


let me say (sweet things to you)

by jubilantly



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Getting Back Together, M/M, au in which juno can be convinced to go on a holiday, diverges from canon after 2.18
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 11:09:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 39,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17202383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jubilantly/pseuds/jubilantly
Summary: "Hey, J, you awake?", Mick says, muffled through the door. "I heard some noise, please tell me there's no burglar in your room."Not anymore, Juno thinks."We're on a cruise ship!", Juno yells in the general direction of the door, "Why would there be a burglar in my room on a damn cruise ship, Mick."





	let me say (sweet things to you)

**Author's Note:**

> I started this immediately after 2.18, intending to write a short fun thing in which Peter reappears, and then it got away from me, and it's not going to get better if I spend another eight months staring at it. Here, have at it.  
> The title is from SHEL's Let Me Do.  
> THANK YOU, you know who you are, for listening to me despair about this for most of the year.

"You gotta stop nearly dying in the desert, Mister Steel!", is what Rita says when Juno is done explaining, interrupted by her exclamations and effusions, where he went, why his eye is gone again, and what the hell he's thinking tracking all that sand into the office.

It's not even that much sand, he left most of it in the taxi.

"Believe it or not, I would actually like to stop doing that," he says, and she squints at him like she doesn't believe him.

"Maybe you should take some time off," she suggests, "Go on a holiday! I saw a commercial the other day while I was watching this stream, for some kinda interplanetary cruises, and that seems like it would be a really fun holiday, and there's this show I liked a lot in the beginning that's kind of crappy now but it has this episode at the beginning of season two, right, when they're broken up, where they go on a cruise, and it-"

He's relieved to be back, he is, but he's also pretty sure he's heard about this particular episode of this particular show before, and he didn't want to hear it the first time around and isn't interested now.

"No," Juno says, and rubs a hand over his face, "no holidays, no cruises."

He stomps over to his office, and Rita sighs loudly and goes to sit back down at her computer.

"Well, if you're gonna be like that," she calls after him, "you can call back the mayor, he called half an hour ago and asked about you, and he called two hours before that, and yesterday too, and I'm starting to think he doesn't have anything better to do, which, y'know, he's the mayor, you'd think he would be real busy, but he just keeps calling."

Juno stops with his hand on the doorknob.

The holiday idea is starting to sound a lot better, actually. It also sounds like the worst possible thing Juno could do right now, to leave when something is going on with Ramses and noone else seems to know and someone has to do something about that, and Juno is tired, but...

"Yeah, yeah, I'll take care of it," he says, "Anyway, it's not like I can afford a holiday."

He doesn't hear Rita's answer before he's in his office and closing the door behind him.

 

It's a mess in there, but it's always been. Juno is chronically unable to not make a mess of every part of his life, and his office is no exception. He throws his coat aside and sits down, falls into his chair almost, and then he has peace and quiet, finally.

The peace and quiet lasts just long enough for him to notice that the sand is in his shoes too, get annoyed about it, then get bored and start rummaging in his desk for the eyepatch he put in a drawer when he got the new eye.

Then his comms beeps at him insistently.

He deliberates, for a moment.

It keeps beeping.

Juno presses the button.

"I know what you're going to say, J, but hear me out," is what Mick says, in lieu of, oh, a greeting or his name maybe, as soon as Juno picks up.

Juno groans.

"And a good afternoon to you too, Mick."

"It is!" says Mick. "I won a cruise!"

Well that's suspicious.

"You what?", Juno says.

"I did the crossword in the magazine and sent in the solution and I actually won a holiday on one of those fancy interplanetary cruise ships, J, can you believe it?"

"I can't, actually."

He can feel a headache coming on, and anxiety digging into his lungs. Remember what happened last time you won something, Mick, he doesn't say but can't help thinking. Remember what happened last time.

"Come on," Mick says, "come on, this is a real for-real thing, I checked, I called the company and asked, I'm not an idiot, it's real and I really don't have to pay anything extra."

"Good for you," Juno tells him. He can hear how skeptical he still sounds, but it's better than sounding worried.

Mick takes an audible breath.

"It's for two people," he says, quick and excited, "and I thought, well, Mercury, you got a best friend, and he could probably use a holiday!"

"No," Juno says, without even thinking about it. "Nope, no way, I'm not going on a cruise with you."

Because they are best friends and Juno has said "no I'm not going to" to Mick about a million times in the time they've known each other, Mick isn't deterred in the slightest.

"It's gonna be great, J, seriously."

"No," Juno says again.

"It's a whole thing, just look at this ship," says Mick, "Hang on, I'm gonna send you a link, look at this!"

Juno does look, out of sheer morbid curiosity, and it turns out that what Mick means is "it's a fancy cruise."

The website is very tasteful and every picture of the ship is very tasteful and it is immediately obvious that this isn't, as Juno thought, one of the big cramped ships, flashing lights everywhere and blue drinks by the bucketful and no room to breathe, but instead something that prides itself on being exclusive.

The pitch, as far as he can see, is as follows: you have a big room with a view in a luxury hotel floating through space, and the amount of other people on the ship is small enough that you could probably talk to all of them in the weeks you spend traveling from one planet to the next. You see all the most beautiful places in your part of the galaxy, and in between there's comfortable days spent in a ship that has seven restaurants and six bars and a spa and a pool and a theatre.

You can take yoga lessons on this cruise.

Juno can't see a price anywhere just yet, but that's probably for the better. He doesn't want to know, he's pretty sure.

"Isn't it great!" Mick says.

There's yoga lessons. The restaurants require you to wear formal wear. It's meant to be a relaxing fun time.

Juno can feel his shoulders getting even tenser already.

"Ugh," he says. "No."

Mick sighs. They sit in silence for a few moments.

Outside of Juno's office, the comms beeps and Rita picks up with her familiar spiel. Juno Steel, Private Eye, what can we help you with.

Juno lifts up a stack of files to clear space in which to put his elbow, finds his eyepatch instead, and contemplates putting it back on. He's right back where he started, and it's not a good feeling.

"Boss?", Rita yells through the door, "The mayor called again!"

Correction: he isn't back where he started, and that's even worse.

"J? Juno?"

Mick's still on the line, waiting for an answer.

As much as Juno doesn't want to go on a cruise, he wants even less to confront Ramses O'Flaherty and that entire situation just yet. And then, someone has to make sure Mick doesn't die.

Sure, leaving Mars will be strange, and seeing Earth and all those other places will be strange, partly because he never thought he would and partly because he has imagined it exactly once.

Twice.

Twice, but for the same reason, and it never happened outside of his head because Juno stayed in Hyperion City. Where he doesn't... really want to be, right now. And Mick is going to go on this cruise, and Mick hasn't left Mars before either, and -

"Yeah," he says, "Still here. When are we going on this cruise?"

 

\---

 

When he tells Rita that he'll be on holiday and won't be calling the mayor back, she gets so excited she nearly breaks her pen, which is all the confirmation Juno needs to more than suspect that she's behind this whole thing. He can't say anything, of course, because he also suspects Mick believes that he really won that cruise, conveniently with two bedrooms and starting in less than a week. But he looked at that website and it didn't look like the kind of thing you win doing a crossword.

It's a relief, to be as sure as he can be about this not being a trap.

He looks at the website again with Rita, because she insists on knowing all the details of where he'll be going and what he'll be doing, as if she doesn't already know. As if she hasn't looked at it extensively when she, well, booked the cruise. (She may not have looked at it that much, Juno realizes a second later, because she worked very fast. Still.)

"God this is so fancy," she says, about the pictures of the ship's interior, "look at all of this, it's exactly like it always is in the streams, and it's so shiny and there's all the lights and I bet it's really romantic. Ohh maybe you'll meet someone, they always do in the movies!"

Juno doesn't want to meet someone. He doesn't want to even think about imagining that possibility, the romantic lighting or whatever, the, being looked at and looking in return and touching and being touched, because he doesn't want that, because the version of it he would want... Well. He's already very aware that he'll be seeing the galaxy with the wrong person, he doesn't need to think about "meeting someone."

Rita scrolls on and puts her chin in her hand.

"It's so pretty," she says, "and these people look so elegant, look at that dress, it must've cost a fortune, and I bet she's got a different one for every day, oh my god, boss, what are you going to wear!"

Compared to anything else Juno has been worrying about, it's a laughable problem, and he's glad to focus on it and let it distract him.

"I have no idea," he says, "Haven't had a reason to dress up in a while."

Rita frowns at him.

"You don't need a reason, reasons aren't why you dress up, you're just never doing anything nice for yourself, Mr Steel."

And before he's processed that, she's presenting him with a whole armada of online catalogues and asking him to make decisions about dresses he might want to buy.

Dresses he is going to wear on a cruise he is going on.

Nice things. What a thought.

 

\---

 

The Countess Cathleen is a big grey thing, hundreds of windows glittering in its metal facade, and it is hovering in the sky above the spaceport, waiting for its passengers to be brought up in smaller shuttles.

There's shuttles already flitting busily to and fro, Juno sees, when he squints against the fuzzy red light of the sky.

(They're not late, exactly, but they didn't plan well enough to arrive early, either.)

Mick's mouth is hanging open, and Juno elbows him.

"Still gotta go through security, Mercury. Plenty of time later to look like you've never seen a spaceship before."

It takes another few seconds for Mick to get moving again, and then he has to gather all his bags.

They have so many bags.

Juno has been feeling strange about how many bags they have for what isn't really that many weeks of traveling, but there's nothing to be done about that now, and then they near the queue for their cruise, which is the shortest queue in the whole spaceport and contains about five times as many suitcases as people, and who knows how many handbags and hat boxes and miscellaneous other luggage, and very suddenly he feels like maybe they have too few bags after all, but there's nothing to be done about that either.

 

The entire check-in and luggage and shuttle and boarding procedure is a confusing thing - it's not unlike a whole lot of things Juno has experience with, but it's still all new, something he has never done before, and he's about as stressed by it as Mick is excited.

Nothing goes wrong, at least. They get through security with only a minor hold-up over Juno's coat, they take a shuttle without getting sick and arrive to the airlocks of the cruise ship safely, with the reassurance that their luggage has also made it up safely and will be in their rooms.

"Oh man, I can't believe this is really happening," Mick says, halfway through another security check. He sounds elated.

Juno feels like his stomach is turning inside out, and he's pretty sure that it's not from flying in a shuttle for two minutes.

 

When they're done with boarding the cruise ship, have gotten through the entire business of airlocks and claustrophobic metal rooms, when they finally enter through what looks like the actual front door of a flying luxury hotel, the moment the door parts with a quiet and triumphant hissing sound, Mick lets out a "woah" so quiet Juno barely hears it.

He's seen this place in pictures like Juno has, presumably, but pictures are one thing, and standing in this cream-coloured, high-ceilinged, warmly and abundantly lit room full of well-dressed strangers is another. There's fur coats rustling and stilettos clacking and people are checking watches that probably cost more than Mick's rent. Mick's and Juno's rent combined, maybe.

The air is thick with perfume and judgement.

Juno isn't particularly impressed. He's worked for rich people and richer people, this isn't new. As condescending as the other people checking in look, and as impeccable as they are dressed, hell, as impeccable as the people behind the reception desks are dressed - he's seen worse.

"My jacket has a hole in the elbow," Mick whispers, frantic.

Someone behind them clears their throat and pushes past immediately, and Juno starts moving toward the small crowd that is pretending to be a queue in front of the reception desks. He has to pull Mick with him by the elbow.

A woman standing at the end of the queue turns around when they get in line and looks disapprovingly down her nose for a second before apparently deciding that they're not worth her time or displeasure.

They really are going on a cruise, Juno realizes, at last. Spaceship and hotel rooms and rich people and all.

He feels like he should take precautions, even though it's mostly too late for that.

"Hey," he tells Mick, "you can check in alone, right? I think I gotta make a call."

Mick nods, self-assured, with an expression that wants to tell Juno he's silly for even asking, and then nods more slowly and starts patting his jacket pockets.

"Fuck," Juno says, "do you have our papers?"

"Course I do," Mick says, offended, like he wasn't wondering the same thing, and pulls several sheets of paper out of his jacket pocket, folded twice but not wrinkled. Not stained, either, or torn. Mick waves them in Juno's face.

"Right," says Juno, backing away and bumping into someone, "back in a minute. Don't lose anything."

Whoever he bumped into isn't bothered enough by it to hold him up, and he finds his way out of the milling crowd and into an alcove without further incidents, and then he takes a moment to breathe and watch the crowd and watch Mick, before he pulls out his comms.

He never calls her, but he's got her number just in case, and she picks up immediately.

"Hello?"

"Sasha."

There's some rustling on the other side.

"Yes? Is everything alright, Juno? Why are you calling me?"

"Going on a holiday with Mick, thought you should know. In case something goes bad, I guess. Which it will, but if it goes really bad..."

The rustling stops abruptly and Sasha clears her throat.

"I don't mean to imply you don't deserve a holiday, but this is rather out of the blue, and very out of character for you."

He can hear her starting to frown.

Mick is getting closer to the reception desk, and there's more people standing between him and Juno now, more people and their big coats and big bags and big egos. (Juno thinks, briefly, that there's something familiar about a movement in the crowd that closes around Mick, there's a quick elegant movement that he could swear he's seen before, but that's an absurd thought.)

"Yeah," he says to Sasha, only slightly delayed, "probably? Running away from my problems isn't that new a thing. Just usually don't leave the planet to do it."

"I'm sorry, what?", Sasha says. She sounds a lot more alert all of a sudden. "You're leaving Mars? I realize it's been a while since we've known each other well, but you've never left Mars before and I don't recall you ever wanting to."

Juno heaves a sigh and scrubs his free hand over his face.

"I've considered it before, and that never quite worked out. But this is really just because Mick won a cruise."

"He won a cruise," Sasha says, flatly. "Mick Mercury won a cruise, and you're just going on that cruise with him?"

"God, I know," Juno says, "I know, he can't possibly have won this thing, it's all laughably convenient, but I don't want to tell him that, and I'm pretty sure that the one who's behind it is my secretary, anyway."

There's silence on the other end for a full five seconds. Sasha takes a breath like she wants to say something, and then she lets it out, and then she takes another.

Juno waits, one moment, another.

"I doubt this is where I'll die my untimely gruesome death," he says.

Mick has gotten to the front of the line, and Juno can hear, vaguely, the cadence of his voice, confusion and friendly ineptitude and excitement, as he checks in. There's a brief commotion around him that seems to be about someone having set their carry-on bag down in the wrong place.

Sasha takes another breath, more decisively.

"Juno," she says, "I'm going to hang up now, and I'm going to get back to the work I am supposed to be doing, and you're going to do your best to not get either of you killed."

"Right," Juno says, and before he can say "bye", she has already hung up on him.

"That went well," he says to himself, shoves his comms back into his coat pocket, and steps out of the alcove to find Mick again.

 

Mick, as soon as he's within arm's length of him again, shoves a keycard at Juno with great enthusiasm, and then waves several papers at him with even greater enthusiasm.

It's several brochures and a printed-out timetable of their scheduled events and a map so convoluted that it'll probably make it harder for them to get around the ship, and not easier. And more brochures, and a copy of the timetable. And a sticky note, for some reason.

"I know where our rooms are," Mick says, gesturing, "I got directions, we go down that way and then left and there's an elevator and we have to get to deck nine and then turn right into the hallway and then we should find our rooms by the numbers!"

Alright then. Juno takes his keycard.

They try to follow the instructions and only get lost once but have to take the elevator, with people who look at them disapprovingly, twice, as the consequence of getting lost. Mick is undeterred, seems to at this point have forgotten any anxieties about holes in his jacket, talks the whole way, keeps waving around all his newly acquired sheets of paper, and makes himself giddy with excitement about how all of their planetside activities are already booked and paid for. They're going to Earth and they're going to see the ocean and they're going to this moon and that city and, and. And.

Juno's stomach has long since dropped out of him. He doesn't want to think about it.

When they walk down the hallway, finally, that their rooms should lie on, he makes the mistake of looking down, because he thinks that'll be better than looking at hotel room doors, and discovers that his shoes look like they don't belong on this carpet. Not because they're old shoes, or bad shoes, or all that dirty. It's just a fancy hallway carpet, without any visible scuff marks or stains or weird sticky patches.

He's a detective, he has his reasons for being uncomfortable with this.

 

They each have their own room, but there's a connecting door, Mick explains, and then they're standing in front of the doors and he fumbles in his pocket and says, "hey, J," very sheepishly, "I think I've lost my keycard."

Juno nearly drops his own keycard.

"You've had it for less than half an hour!"

It's the last straw, and it's also a relief, to slip into this familiar annoyed mindset, even if it's just for a few moments, even if it's unfair to Mick maybe.

"I know!", Mick says.

Juno throws his hands into the air.

"How the hell did you lose your keycard this fast!"

"I don't know," says Mick, "It's not like I did it on purpose."

That much Juno could've guessed. If he'd done it on purpose, he probably wouldn't have managed to actually lose the damn keycard.

"Gonna have to go to the reception again," he says, "Great. Making a really good impression."

Mick looks disappointed with him.

"I can go alone, you can go be grumpy alone in your room."

"Great," Juno says, and shoves his keycard into the lock, "I will, thank you."

 

\---

 

The suite Juno walks into is big enough that he won't have to worry about stubbing his toe on the way to the bathroom, which is more than he can say about his apartment.

It's also pristine and cozy and all kinds of other things Juno isn't used to, and the lights turn on softly when he enters, and there's a large window looking out into the infinity of space, that vast frightening promising thing, stars twinkling, infinite possibilities, infinite opportunities, whatever it is that people say about this.

Juno pulls the curtains closed.

He doesn't go into the bedroom properly yet, or the bathroom, because he doesn't want to make himself at home, he feels like he'd throw up if he did try to make himself at home, he doesn't even know if he knows how to make himself at home, but he stops that train of thought and he does find the minifridge, and then he considers its collected contents, and then he sits down on an armchair, with his coat still on, and waits for something to justify how bad he feels. Something that won't just make him feel worse.

Somewhere, a speaker clicks on, and a pleasant voice informs all passengers that now that everyone has boarded, they'll be leaving Hyperion City Spaceport shortly, to start their journey.

No way out now, in other words.

It echoes in Juno's head in aimless shaky circles.

He keeps waiting, and Mick keeps taking an age, and then Juno starts pacing, and then he stands in the door to the bedroom and looks at his suitcase standing next to a giant, soft-looking bed, tidily made, white pillows fluffed, blankets smooth, and clearly clearly clearly meant for two people.

Juno stares at it and swallows once and his throat closes up.

At some point, there's a knock on the door connecting their rooms, and it's clearly Mick, it can't be anyone else, but for a second Juno panics and reaches for a weapon he left at home.

"Got my keycard," Mick says, muffled through the door, "Can I come in?"

Juno swallows again, and drops his hand and breathes in and remembers how to be annoyed at his best friend instead of... this, and grumbles something, and it's enough of a response that Mick opens the door.

"You're still wearing your coat," he points out, when he's walked in, and then he brandishes a keycard as if he accomplished something great. "And I didn't actually lose my keycard, I lost someone else's keycard, there was a mix-up when we got them apparently. Anyway, Ms Court hadn't lost mine, so they only have to get her a new one."

Juno hears the words and can't hold onto most of them. Mick has done a thing, he guesses.

"Great."

Mick frowns at Juno.

"What's with the face?"

"It's the same face I've always had," Juno says, automatically.

"Fine, okay," Mick says, "but you can't be like this forever, we're here to have fun."

Juno snorts.

"Yeah, no."

 

\---

 

He spends most of that day continuing to feel sorry for himself, and trying not to think about why, and then Mick drags him out of his room in the evening to go have dinner.

In a restaurant.

Which Juno has to dress up for at least a little.

He hates cruises with every fiber of his being, right now, and he feels awkward and vulnerable without his gun and his coat and a thing to chase after. His eyepatch looks out of place on him when he's put on something nice and looks at himself in the mirror, and he supposes what that means is that he'll look out of place in the restaurant, and every other place on this ship, for the next weeks, because they will be on this ship for weeks.

Mick ignores all of this and cheerfully gets them lost on their way to the restaurants, and then they can't get a table in the one Mick wanted to go to and have to go to a different one, and Juno's skin is crawling when they finally get to sit down and look at their menus.

"Mr Mercury," someone says, "good evening!"

"Hey!", Mick says.

Juno lifts the menu up further and hopes for the best.

"I'm afraid my brother has abandoned me," the stranger says, "may I sit with you and your... friend?"

"Absolutely," Mick says, and then, "this is my best friend Juno, Juno this is Ms Celia Court, who had my keycard!"

Juno looks up begrudgingly.

Celia Court is beautiful enough to be intimidating even without expensive jewelry, but she wears that anyway, and she's tall, probably taller than Juno even though she isn't wearing heels, and she's wearing a smile second in hidden threat only to that of- well. This is not the moment. This is not the moment, no moment of this trip has been or will be the moment, and he shoves the thought into some corner of his brain.

"Juno Steel," he says, and clears his throat.

"Pleased to meet you."

She sits down and someone brings her her own menu much faster than they did for Juno and Mick, presumably because she looks like she'd put up much more of a fuss about being inconvenienced, and also like she could potentially tip a lot better.

Then again, everyone here except Juno and Mick does.

Mick starts a conversation, or maybe Celia does, but Juno tunes out while Mick recounts how he won the cruise and Celia laughs and asks him what he does. He watches, instead, as more people come in and sit down around them, all wearing clothes Juno couldn't afford if he sold his soul again and expressions that say that they know it.

Some of them look familiar, passing resemblance to faces from briefly-glimpsed front pages of magazines and newspapers, and one woman looks suspiciously like every Kanagawa he's met; it's about the expected level of unsettling, but even Juno has to admit there doesn't seem to be any danger currently.

He's still jittery.

"And what do you do?", Celia Court says.

It takes Juno a moment to realize the question is meant for him.

"I'm a private eye," he says, "taking a break currently, but. That's what I do when my friends haven't won cruises and invited me along."

"Oh! That must be exciting," says Celia.

Juno shrugs.

He's still looking around, watching, and when he glances through glass walls out of the restaurant into the little fake courtyard, somewhere half-hidden behind vases and chandeliers and big hairstyles he spots someone in a suit who seems, for a moment, familiar not like a deja-vu, but familiar like a name Juno can't bring himself to think.

"Not really, there's a lot of paperwork," he tells Celia.

Celia, after a brief raise of her eyebrows, turns away like that's all it took to make him uninteresting, and catches the eye of a waiter, who hurries over to their table.

They order.

Juno feels out of his depth.

He feels out of his depth and his element and his comfort zone if he ever had one, and he feels like he may be outside of his body too, a little, and it's not a great feeling.

As soon as the waiter is gone, Mick leans forward like he's thought of something good, and Juno tenses.

"You said something about your brother, didn't you?"

He's only remembered how conversation works. Of course. But Juno can't un-tense, for some reason.

Celia laughs.

"I did. Quentin abandoned me in favor of following up on a meet-cute he had earlier."

Cruises, it seems, are a lot more like the soap operas than expected. Rita will be delighted, Juno thinks, inanely.

"Oh man," Mick says, genuinely delighted, "wow."

It earns him another laugh from Celia.

"Yes," she says, "here I am, on a holiday with my brother, co-heir to the family business, and he abandons me for a man with a pretty face who allegedly told him he was looking forward to being on this cruise with him."

Juno flinches before he can stop himself, because he's tense and sick to his stomach already, because everything about this holiday seems set on reminding him of a regret he had nearly buried under all the newer or older ones, and now all his thoughts are a maelstrom inexorably dragging him towards memories that won't get him anywhere.

"Co-heir?", he asks, like redirecting Celia's and Mick's attention will work even a little, and for good measure he busies himself smoothing out his napkin.

Celia raises her eyebrows again, but plays along.

"It's complicated. We both inherit, but we inherit at all only because we're siblings."

"Ah," says Juno.

It's not been long enough to hope for the arrival of their food to save him.

 

\---

 

After the first day, Juno starts to settle, a little. He's not seeing phantoms everywhere, for one, and maybe it's because he's slept some, maybe it's because he's argued himself out of thinking stupid things, maybe it's because he's eating regularly, much as he complains about everything, maybe it's that spending time with Mick is good for him, which he'll never as long as either of them is alive say out loud, and maybe it's because he's also unfortunately busy - as much as he still hates the thought of any and all activities offered on the ship, Mick's enthusiasm manages to pull him out of his room for more than just mealtimes.

Juno is getting bored, though, and he's still restless, and a little on edge, and half hoping that something will go wrong, because that's what he's used to, that's what he knows how to deal with, and really, he's off Mars, anything could happen.

What does happen is that they get lost so much that it's embarrassing.

It's not even a big ship, there's much bigger ones for much less exclusive crowds, but it has so, so many floors and doors and twists and turns and strategically room-dividing plants, and several times they think they've gone in circles until they realize that there's just two identical elevators.

On day three, the second full day, they venture out of their room and don't get lost, and then they're so proud of themselves for figuring out that mystery that they take a wrong turn and go down the wrong hallway.

It looks, obviously, like all the other hallways.

Except there's a figure a ways down the hall, standing in front of a door, ankles crossed, to all appearances studying the plaque with the room's number on it very intently.

It's a man with very shiny shoes and impeccable black trousers, and a shirt so tailored that Juno momentarily wonders if he can breathe in it at all. He looks like he has never done anything in his life except belong right here on this shiny, stuffy cruise ship, and then he tilts his head in a familiar way and Juno has just the space between one breath and the next to prepare, and to curse himself for thinking that he was seeing phantoms when he should have known that his memory could never replicate any of this as perfectly as he thought it had, and to curse himself doubly for the way his heartbeat stutters and picks up again, before the man turns around and their eyes meet.

Juno can't even blink, let alone look away.

"Well," says Peter Nureyev, in his usual blithely unaffected way, "I can't say this is how I pictured our reunion."

He has new glasses.

Juno stares at him. Puts his hands in his pockets, takes them back out immediately.

There's a chasm opening in his brain, and he can hear his pulse rushing in his ears like it by all rights only should in situations that involve guns and the imminent threat of painful death. His every thought has screeched to a halt and his brain is firing off new thoughts and abandoning them so quickly that he feels sick.

"Yeah, me neither," he says, shortly.

He has pictured it in a thousand different ways, whenever he's tired or desperate or stupidly optimistic enough to allow himself to, and this, any part of this, never occurred to him to imagine.

They look at each other for a tense moment, and then seconds that stretch out full of unspoken possibilities across the dark red carpet between them. So long as they don't move, Juno guesses, nothing bad can happen. He doesn't know what bad means, here; an argument, another goodbye, a conversation that demands he say things he can't say out loud. So long as noone moves, they're safe - here's something that's already broken and will shatter if they touch it, but so long as they don't move -

"Wow," Mick Mercury says, utterly sincere and as enthused as he is confused, "do you know this guy, J?"

He doesn't mean for it to be a jarring question, of course he doesn't, because he really, truly doesn't know, and Juno almost laughs when he realizes that this is all in his head.

"We've met," he says.

Peter Nureyev smirks just slightly, one corner of his mouth curling up, with no regard for Juno's feelings on the matter, which surely must be written across his face because they've always been for Nureyev, who... takes a few brisk steps towards them to offer Mick his hand for a handshake.

"Earl Grey," he says.

So that's who he is here and now. And unless Juno is misremembering him, he is smiling differently now, too, not different like someone faking a smile, but entirely like a different person. Juno allows himself a moment to marvel at how good Peter Nureyev is at what he does, and to try and push away his racing thoughts, while Mick shakes Nureyev's hand and smiles back.

"Mick Mercury! I'm Juno's best friend, we've known each other for ages."

"Have you," Nureyev asks. His eyes meet Juno's briefly.

Juno doesn't know what Nureyev sees, or what he wants to see.

"Yeah!", Mick says, "Like, since childhood. How d'you know each other?"

"Oh, there was a case, I was tangentially involved, it was very exciting," Nureyev says, and this time his eyes meet Juno's and stay.

"I don't know if that's the word I would use," Juno blurts out and regrets immediately when Nureyev raises his eyebrows and turns fully towards him.

"Which word?", he asks.

He's smirking again, like he knows exactly what he's doing, because he does know, because he always knows.

Juno wishes he were anywhere else. He wishes he could turn back time just slightly to avoid meeting Peter Nureyev unprepared and with Mick at his side.

Although. At least this way they can't say any of the things they might say if they were alone, and they can't discover that they have nothing to say beyond references to there being something to say.

This conversation is going to end and Juno is going to have given himself a headache.

"He doesn't like when I say it's exciting, either," Mick says. "Because it's dangerous, and all that."

Thank fate and chance and any benevolent or malevolent higher powers there may be for Mick Mercury, Juno thinks, and starts looking for escape routes.

Peter Nureyev is still looking at him.

"Ah," he says, in that voice he has, "I see."

"We should go," Juno says, "Mick, I think we should go, we've got. Things to do."

When he looks away from Nureyev for good, he can see Mick looking more confused than before, but Juno turns away and starts striding down the hallway in the direction they came from without waiting for a further reaction, and he can hear Mick say "sorry, see you later," and the sound of him jogging to catch up, and Juno makes his strides longer and stomps a little on the fancy carpet and breathes through his nose.

 

"What was that?", Mick says, very loudly, as soon as they're in Juno's room and Juno has slammed the door closed.

Juno walks to the small fridge and opens it.

"What was what?"

"Earl Grey!"

There's a lot of options to choose from, Juno notices, looking at the contents of the fridge. He settles on a bottle that looks familiar from past bad choices, pulls it out, and closes the fridge door with his elbow while opening the bottle.

"An acquaintance," he says, "Like I said."

"Bullshit," Mick tells him, and then, "I don't think you should drink that out of the bottle."

 

\---

 

Things get complicated after that.

They don't really, they just feel like they will, it's just Juno's feelings that emerge collectively from where he'd been ignoring them and get complicated, more complicated, justified by the fact that Nureyev is actually here, not just a memory dragged to the surface by the circumstances, but really here, on this cruise ship which Juno has to stay on for another few weeks, with no sure way of avoiding him and no sure way of... anything.

Juno has no idea what to expect.

He has no idea how angry Nureyev is at him, he has no idea if Nureyev feels any kind of way about him anymore, he has no idea what he's supposed to want or allowed to want here, and on top of that, truly the cherry on top of this is, he has no idea what kind of job Nureyev is doing on this cruise ship, but he's sure there must be a job, and that doesn't make anything easier.

Staying in his room until the cruise is over seems very tempting.

When Mick tries to check up on Juno again, Juno has finished the glass of whatever it was that Mick made him put in an actual glass, and he's sitting uncomfortably on an armchair and just past the stage where he would've yelled at Mick just to make someone else even just a fraction of as uncomfortable as he is.

He's pretty sure, now, that all the glimpses of Nureyev he thought were his imagination were, in fact, not that, and following logically from that is careening off into getting suspicious of the probability of keycard mix-ups and meet-cutes.

He can just imagine the meet-cute, too, how someone would orchestrate bumping into someone else, the surprise and then the smile.

It's what was to be expected.

Somewhere on this cruise ship, looking at home in a shiny, half-lit room, is Peter Nureyev, well-dressed and phased by nothing, being someone else, hanging onto someone's every word and looking at them with bright eyes, waiting for the right moment to steal whatever it is this time.

"Do you want to talk about it now?", Mick asks.

Juno wants to throw up.

"No," he says.

 

\---

 

And then somehow, through a series of events happening faster than he can follow through the mess he has made of his head and his heart, Juno ends up having dinner at the same table as Peter Nureyev, who sits diagonally across from him, cut off from him by the conversation that Mick and the Courts are having.

As Juno put together just hours before, and he feels no victory in being right, the person Peter Nureyev is making a fool of is Mr Quentin Court, twin brother of Ms Celia Court - not too sure of himself because, to be honest, he has no reason to be, probably not actually unpleasant to be around, but Juno hates and pities him in equal measure for being the focus of Peter Nureyev's attention.

And what an attention it is.

Nureyev is still charming, because he's never not been, because it is probably impossible for him to not be. It's all wrapped up and hidden in Earl Grey's personality, or the personality of whoever else Nureyev is right now, which seems to be mostly the one person who could be impressed by Quentin Court, but still always charming and beautiful, and even the persona, even this near-perfect mask, doesn't quite manage to hide all the sharpness Juno knows is behind it.

Juno, in turn, doesn't quite manage to stop watching Nureyev.

Celia introduced them, and it was surreal, and Mick told her that they bumped into each other in the hallway earlier, and Juno nodded, he thinks, and "Earl Grey" smiled blandly and didn't look at Juno for more than a second and even then not in the eyes, and that was that.

Juno hasn't talked to him yet, even though they're nearly done eating.

He hasn't talked to Earl Grey and not to Nureyev, and Nureyev hasn't talked to Juno either, though he does look at him occasionally, fleeting glances that are barely more than a polite acknowledgment of his presence at the table.

It's maddening in every possible way and some that Juno thought impossible.

In the dim golden light of the restaurant, Peter Nureyev looks like he stepped right out of Juno's most regretful half-memory half-daydreams, and he's just close enough for Juno to see his smiles and hear the cadence of his voice, but not close enough to talk or close enough to touch, because there's a table and three people and a separation without goodbye sitting between them.

Juno watches him more than he should and more than he could get away with without someone noticing, probably, but he keeps looking, keeps watching, and it makes him feel all kinds of longing and anger and regret, and when he gets to jealousy of Mr Court he starts drinking, but he doesn't stop watching, because he doesn't have that kind of self-control.

He doesn't taste any of his food.

Nureyev is a mystery to Juno and Juno's feelings are a mystery to Juno and it's a mess he doesn't want to untangle. But in addition to everything else, Nureyev is trying to do a job, that much is clear, and it's probably not even a little bit legal, and someone should probably stop it, and Juno clings onto that like a lifetime, because he can solve it for x like he won't be able to solve anything else about meeting Peter Nureyev again.

(He ignores, stubbornly, his vivid recollections of the last time he wanted to foil one of Peter Nureyev's plans. He tries, at the very least.)

 

\---

 

It doesn't even end there. He doesn't manage to excuse himself when the rest of the group decides to move on to a bar, so the day doesn't end there and he ends up sitting on a barstool at the cleanest bar he has ever seen, in a room lit blue and purple, and he gets a drink and he feels uncomfortable and he keeps watching.

Celia and Quentin, it seems, are having a private conversation, a sibling conversation, noone else invited, Juno takes a drink, and because Quentin isn't available, Nureyev has wandered off to talk to anyone else who doesn't know to run away.

His current conversation is with an old woman holding a violently green drink. Juno can't hear what they're saying, can barely see them at the other end of the room, but he keeps looking.

Not like he has anything better to do. (Not like he has ever chosen to do the thing that's better for him, anyway.)

Mick, next to him, is in a good enough mood that he doesn't push, but he's definitely noticed where Juno is looking, and he's made a face like he wants to say something several times now, so it's a matter of minutes before he'll demand answers.

The old woman laughs at something Nureyev says and puts her hand on her heart, and he quirks an eyebrow and looks entirely satisfied with the situation, and Juno should stop watching because he decided to focus on the job part of this, and he doesn't think he is, he has to admit to himself that he's been looking not for clues but for the curve of a smile and the points of teeth and the slow blink of long eyelashes, but when he's trying to resolve to turn away, Nureyev seems to be excusing himself and the woman offers her hand and he takes it and when he turns away and leaves, Juno is apparently the only one who notices that where there were three sparkling rings on the woman's finger before, there's now only two.

If that isn't a clue, Juno doesn't know what is.

Juno only has one eye, and he's drunk, and he's distracted, and the lighting is bad, but he's almost certain the missing ring was underneath the others. In any case, it has disappeared.

Where it has disappeared to is unclear - Juno doesn't know where Nureyev's outfit could possibly have room for a pocket, but he certainly isn't going to ask.

He wishes he could say with the same confidence that he isn't staring and hasn't been for the past ten minutes, but that would be a lie and he knows it and he has already admitted to himself that he knows it, and he dimly suspects that most of the other occupants of the room know it, too.

Mick has been raising his eyebrows at him intermittently for the past quarter of an hour, but they're doing something questioning and questionable now.

"Think you might've had enough to drink," Juno tells him. "Your eyebrows keep doing this really bizarre thing."

Mick points a finger at him in a gesture of exaggerated accusation.

"Your eye is doing a thing, and it's staring at Earl Grey!"

"You're drunk," Juno says.

"Not that drunk."

Juno ignores him and keeps looking, and when their eyes meet, Nureyev doesn't look away.

Juno couldn't look away if he tried.

They both deliberate for a moment, two moments, three, Juno's heart in his throat and also all the way dropped out of him; Mick snorts and picks up his drink and slides off his stool, and then he winks clumsily and leaves Juno all alone to deal with Peter Nureyev, who is walking towards him now, winding through the people between them and pausing to say a word or three and laugh like he's not that invested in getting to the bar.

Juno turns towards the bar and towards his glass.

The glass is empty, it turns out.

"Drink?", Nureyev asks, and Juno accepts the new glass without any conscious decision to do so.

They sit in silence for a minute. There's music playing, and people are talking, and Juno can hear Celia Court sounding amused about something and Mick starting on a longwinded anecdote.

He doesn't want to be here, and everyone else is having the time of their lives, it seems.

Nureyev clears his throat delicately.

"I must say, I didn't expect you here, of all places."

Juno shrugs.

"Off Mars, out of your beloved Hyperion City," Nureyev continues, "And these cruises are awfully expensive, too."

"Mick won the cruise," Juno says and lifts the glass to his mouth.

He doesn't know what's happening. He has no idea what he's doing.

"Did he!", says Nureyev, "Lucky guy, Mr Mercury. I didn't know it was possible to win these kinds of cruises."

The tone of his voice is edging closer and closer to what Rex Glass sounded like, and if he thinks that's going to do him any favours, Juno thinks, he is sorely mistaken.

"Did you just want to make smalltalk," he says, when he's put his glass down, with too much force, "or did you want to make uncomfortable smalltalk?"

"I always want to make uncomfortable smalltalk," Nureyev says, "It is my very favourite pastime, you should be aware of that, detective."

Juno drinks.

He hates this. He hates this, he wants it to be over, he wants to hold onto it because it's all he's ever going to get, after what happened, after he made his choice.

"So, Earl," he says after a moment's consideration, because he's nothing if not good at saying the wrong thing. Nureyev doesn't flinch. "With these cruises being as expensive as they are, how are you here?"

"If you're asking Earl," Nureyev tells him, "the answer is that some people can just afford these cruises, without needing any luck."

"Fine," Juno says, "Fine, and if I'm not asking Earl?"

Nureyev grins at him and Juno can see his pointy teeth dig into his bottom lip when the grin becomes a smirk.

Damn it, Juno thinks. God damn it all to hell.

"I have my ways, detective."

And then Nureyev gets up and leaves.

 

\---

 

Juno sleeps badly that night, and spends the next day hiding in his room avoiding further interaction with Nureyev.

He can get by on room service; it's fine.

It's fine.

Despite his repeatedly saying that he's fine, Mick spends most of the day in Juno's room, too, and annoys him into eating, not drinking, and watching half a season of a show Mick likes and Rita loves and Juno can't see the appeal of.

Mick's comms beeps loudly in the middle of a conversation that consists for the most part of Juno avoiding the subject of Peter Nureyev, or Earl Grey, while Mick gets increasingly curious and annoyed.

They put the argument on hold so Mick can pick up the comms.

"Oh, it's Sasha!", he says.

He sounds happy about it, if surprised.

Juno has a bad feeling about the upcoming conversation.

"I'm gonna put her on speaker," Mick says, and presses the Accept Call button without waiting for a reaction from Juno.

"Mick," Sasha says, a little tinny through the connection because they're some distance away from Mars at this point and even a Dark Matter agent doesn't have a better comms connection than everyone else, "Juno called a few days ago and said something about a cruise you won. It sounded ridiculous, but I can never be sure that that means it's not true, with the two of you."

She sounds, to be honest, about as exhausted as Juno feels, if probably less self-pitying, definitely less of a mess, and likely not... having inconvenient feelings. Though possibly having problems with master thieves.

"We actually are on a cruise," Mick says, "and I did win it, and Juno is with me!"

Sasha sighs. It crackles.

"Don't get yourselves killed, Mick. Is... Juno doing any better?"

"I'm right here," Juno says, too loud and too offended, "You're on speaker. Really, Sasha, what did you expect."

She doesn't answer for a moment, in which Mick pushes the comms closer to Juno and shuffles around in his armchair and picks up a bottle opener from the table and starts spinning it around and around his finger.

"Well," says Sasha finally, "I'm guessing you're as you always are, then. At least you're still alive."

 

\---

 

Their first stop is Earth, and they get there just as soon as everyone has settled in. Allegedly noone's gotten lost on their way from the pool to their room in over 24 hours, the company people keep for activities is more-or-less fixed, and Juno has been informed by Mick, who actually left Juno's room at some point the previous day, that someone has started complaining about boredom with the sameness of everything. It's time for something to happen, so the time for their first stop is, naturally, now.

Earth is visible from the windows, blue and strange, and they've been told to be ready by nine.

Juno is not ready by nine. He's wearing shoes and a scowl and is ready to board a shuttle, but he is not ready.

Most of the other passengers are not ready by nine because noone who goes on a luxury cruise has ever had to be punctual in their lives, so people trickle slowly into the shuttle bay and into the shuttles, and it takes a while for the shuttle Juno and Mick are in to fill up enough that they can leave.

The last ones in, because that's how these things go, are Ms Celia Court and entourage, and as soon as they've all sat down, the doors close, hissing, the shuttle starts humming, everyone is talking excitedly, and Juno is... quiet.

He's on his way to a planet other than Mars for the first time in his life, he really is now. It was easy to half-forget, in a hotel room, with thoughts of Nureyev to occupy him and distract him, but here he is. This is happening.

He's feeling a little carsick.

He's feeling a little sick and he isn't, he isn't, he isn't thinking about it.

Somehow, because the universe is laughing at him, Peter Nureyev is sitting right across the aisle from Juno, all awake, mask on, not a hair out of place except the intentional ones, back turned towards Juno.

He should've argued with Mick for the window seat, Juno thinks.

They should've been here together, and then Juno knew they weren't going to be, and now they are but they're not, and they haven't even spoken to each other yet today, just nodded in acknowledgment because everyone else was greeting each other when they entered the shuttle.

So Juno's feeling carsick and regretful, and something else he can't name that wants and wants, and he kind of feels like laughing just so he doesn't scream or cry, and Nureyev is turned away from him, having a conversation with Mr Court.

Juno stares at him anyway, for a while, idly imagining a world in which he's sitting in a window seat on the other side of the aisle and having something better to do than looking out of the window.

It's a very nice image.

It's a very stupid thing to imagine.

When he's made himself feel even worse, he looks away, and leans halfway across Mick, who is bouncing his legs, to let him point out every emerging detail as they get closer to Earth.

"Wow," Mick says every now and then, "look at that thing!", and Juno looks, and makes an appropriate noise, and doesn't turn away from the window for the rest of the flight.

 

\---

 

After everything that humanity did to their original home planet, the thing Earth is proudest of is the nature they managed to preserve and the nature they coaxed back and the landscapes they never ruined entirely.

Which means that the plan for today involves going on a hike.

Not quite a hike, but definitely not the city exploration on familiar concrete streets that Juno kind of expected. Or that others expected, it turns out, when they've been herded out of the shuttle and into another shuttle and to the National Park and stand, marveling, on a path that is neither paved nor flat nor going straight.

"Goodness," Nureyev says, "I don't think I have the right shoes for this little adventure."

Mr Court laughs.

"Me either. Should've listened to Celia."

Juno hates them both.

Mind, he doesn't have the right shoes either, but he never has the right shoes for any given situation; it's not that. They're just... he keeps hearing them talking.

They've been talking since they got in the first shuttle, and none of it has been at all meaningful, as far as Juno has overheard, but they keep talking.

They talk and talk and Mick talks and talks and Juno can't bring himself to talk or really look at the world around him, and he resents Nureyev for having this easy conversation and looking at trees without any sign of, god, anything.

He knows, Juno knows that that's what Nureyev does, and also that Nureyev isn't the one who left without warning, and really none of this is anything but what it should be, but that doesn't make it better.

Trees, Juno thinks, grabbing onto the first thought that isn't... that. He's never seen this many trees before, or these kinds of trees, or indeed a place in which trees just grow, of their own volition, without having to be carried there and planted into unfriendly soil and constantly convinced to stay alive.

They're incredibly green, and the sky is a little cloudy but there's glimpses of postcard-sky blue in between, and even the clouds, big and white as they are, are unlike anything Mars has.

Sometime later, their guide tells them, they'll be walking along a river for a while, and then take a boat so they get to see the ocean, too.

The ocean. It's hard to believe that a planet could contain this much water, and Juno doesn't know if he'll believe it even when he sees it.

But for now, they walk between trees, and Mick's mouth is hanging open as he looks up and up into the green canopy, and squints to the sides into the half-light every time a bird makes a noise.

No place on Mars is this full of anything other than metal and plastic and asphalt.

A bug is crawling on the side of the path, and Mick exclaims, a wordless noise of surprise and delight and should-I-be-panicking?

It's a nice way to spend a day, probably.

Juno can't look at anything without wishing that he were looking at it because Nureyev pointed it out.

 

\---

 

The miserable carsickness feeling isn't yet properly gone by the time they get on a boat, and Juno hates boats, it turns out.

The river is wide and rushing towards the sea, and their boat is wobbling a little, and there is basically nothing between Juno and the very deep, very fast water, and it's all remarkably unsafe-feeling.

Mick is grinning so wide it might do permanent damage to his face, even as he's holding on to the railing for dear life and his nose is running from the wind and he looks utterly undignified.

Juno may look more undignified because he feels sick and is unhappy, he knows, but at least he's aware of it.

He is very very aware of it.

A few steps further towards the front of the boat, Peter Nureyev is standing at the railing, leaning, his hair getting blown about by the wind and tousled hopelessly. He's smiling, too, and he's not undignified at all, and he's half-involved in a conversation between Celia and Mr Court, but seems content to just stand and listen and look at the trees, and to occasionally glance towards Juno like he's waiting for something.

Juno doesn't know what he's waiting for.

He didn't think there was anything Nureyev still wanted from him, but he's looking at him, he keeps looking at him like he's waiting for something, and he's looking just a little bit hopeful and just a little bit vulnerable and Juno... doesn't know what to do with that.

Juno has already resolved to accept his fate, and now this.

He wants to sit down, but he doesn't; he just keeps standing, and he can't bear to look at Nureyev so he keeps looking down into the water and feeling slightly sick from the movement, and feeling vindicated about it, and waiting to be more sick.

It doesn't go on for long, he thinks; he isn't sure, but he hasn't gotten properly sick yet when Mick gasps next to him, and Juno feels him stand up straighter.

Time to look at the ocean, Juno thinks, and doesn't move his eyes away from the water rushing along the slightly dented, not-quite-white-anymore side of the boat.

Time to be on this trip and look at all of the sights there are to see.

"Look up," Peter Nureyev says, quietly, and much closer to Juno than he was the last time Juno checked, "we're there."

Juno looks up too quickly.

Nureyev is watching him, curious and almost a little nervous, if that were something he ever is, and with a half-smile, and behind him, Juno can see the river widen and take up more and more space until it meets the ocean, which is endless.

It's endless and blue-green-grey and like nothing else, and it hurts to look at, a little, and Nureyev is still looking at Juno, and that hurts too.

Juno clears his throat.

"Lot of water."

Nureyev glances down, at the railing they're both leaning against, two pairs of hands holding on, white-knuckled.

"You don't seem to be enjoying Earth as much as I thought you would."

And isn't that just a punch to the gut, and everything that Juno has been dreading, and everything he has been trying to forget.

"I," Juno says, and then he shuts his mouth and doesn't know how to continue. His throat is closing up.

Nureyev waits.

"I didn't imagine it the way it turned out to be, I guess," Juno manages, after a few seconds.

For just a moment, a fraction of a heart-stopping moment, Nureyev looks down again and his mouth opens a little and Juno can nearly imagine him offering to have this trip be what it should have been, and then -

"Neither did I," Nureyev says, perfectly unmoved, "but you know that."

Juno does know that.

"Oh," says Ms Celia Court, also suddenly too close, and sounding delighted, "did you know each other before this cruise?"

When Juno turns, too fast, to look at her, she's looking between them like she's never been more curious about anything. Juno doesn't like it one bit.

"A little." He clears his throat, to no avail. "You know, my work, I meet a lot of people."

She laughs brightly.

"Well," she says, "I do hope Mr Grey wasn't a suspect."

"No," Juno says.

Nureyev laughs, too.

He's leaning against the railing again, unbothered, his long legs crossed at the ankles.

"No, I was neither a suspect nor a victim of anything, the good detective's work just happened to take him to the right place at the right time for our paths to cross, nothing more."

 

\---

 

They move on from Earth. They are going to leave the solar system behind, soon.

Barely any of their trip has passed, and Juno wishes he had stayed on Mars, and he wants a break from this holiday.

He spends the day after Earth in his room, mostly, trying to distract himself and failing miserably, and then he has to have dinner with Mick and the Courts and Nureyev again, and Nureyev isn't talking to him.

Of course he isn't, Celia is already much too aware of there being a history, and anyway, there's Mr Quentin Court to be talked to, and listened to, and looked at.

Nureyev has been laughing at Mr Court's jokes for the past thirty minutes, even though none of the jokes are funny enough to be laughed at.

(It's not like Juno's been listening the whole time on purpose, he just can't help overhearing the conversation, because they're sitting at the same damn table.)

Really, Mr Court is embarrassingly bad at making jokes. They all have vaguely the right shape, recognizable as jokes, but none of them manage to be funny. And still Nureyev laughs, the laugh of Earl Grey, because he has a job and a plan, presumably.

It must all be part of a plan, it must, but so far no two things Nureyev has done have fit together to make sense as leading to the same goal, so what does Juno know. He's just assuming that there's a job and that the laughing is part of the plan, and the arm-touching, and the occasional almost-bashfully lowered eyelashes.

Juno wants to kick something. Possibly himself.

 

\---

 

The next day isn't any better, and the day after that Juno wakes up and knows it won't be better either, and that's perfectly fine, but Mick has gotten bored and decided they are going to go to the pool. Because that's what they're supposed to be doing here.

"God, I hate cruises," Juno says.

It's muffled, a complaint lost in the bedsheets.

"Come on," Mick says, "get up, come on, we haven't been to the pool yet and we really should."

Juno lifts his head and glares.

"No."

 

They go to the pool.

The pool area is large and shiny and full of entirely useless decorative objects, like every place on the damn cruise ship. There's veritable herds of potted plants and very tiny tables placed strategically between dozens of deck chairs, and tinier plants on the tiny tables, and forgotten glasses and magazines and a single sweater crumpled on an empty deck chair, and the very fact of deck chairs is ridiculous, Juno thinks, and says multiple times.

In any case, the pool is where Mick wanted to go, so the pool is where they go, and Juno regrets it the moment Mick has chosen a deck chair to lie down on.

It's an inevitability.

The room is large enough and already busy enough that Juno didn't immediately register all of the other occupants, but not large enough to avoid someone forever, so he nods politely at Mr Court, who is in the pool but hanging lazily on to the edge, and hurries to sit down and hide somehow. Maybe he can pretend to be asleep, he thinks.

He has no such luck.

"Mr Mercury! Mr Steel!", Quentin Court says, and it doesn't echo because this is a pool built for rich people, but it's still loud enough.

At least Celia isn't with him.

"Good morning," Juno says.

There is someone on a deck chair next to where Mr Court is floating, holding up a magazine so it's impossible to see a face, let alone an expression, but Mr Court is very predictable in the company he keeps, Earl Grey wears very distinctively non-distinctive clothes, and Juno knows he wouldn't be so lucky.

Peter Nureyev lowers the magazine briefly to wave at Juno and Mick.

He's only a very short distance away from Mick's chair, and Juno can't choose a chair on Mick's other side without being suspicious, so he sits down only a few steps away from Nureyev and feels awkward as he lies down.

Mr Court starts swimming, after a while, and then Mick starts snoring.

Juno can't sleep and doesn't want to swim, and he didn't bring anything to read, and he's trying to figure out if he can fake being asleep, just to avoid all of this, when his eyepatch gets itchy in the humid room.

Ignoring it doesn't work, and he knows all too well that scratching won't help, and he definitely can't pretend to sleep while the damn eyepatch keeps itching.

He takes it off. He considers faking sleep.

"You didn't get a new eye," Nureyev says, low enough that probably only Juno can hear.

Juno wants to ignore him, he does, but that'd be making it too easy for himself, so he opens his eye and sits up a little and turns towards Nureyev as much as he can without seeming like he's... something.

"Oh, I did," he says.

Nureyev leans further towards him and raises his eyebrows.

"Did you lose it, then?", he asks, and rests his elbow on the arm of his deck chair, "Did they not let you through security with it? That'd be incredibly bad service and you should file a complaint."

This is not what Juno expected. He doesn't know what he expected, but not this, not... jokes? Teasing? It's just friendly smalltalk, and he sounds genuinely curious, maybe.

Juno watches the light bounce off the water and breathes out through his nose.

"Nope. Had some criminals in the desert get rid of it for me."

"On purpose?"

Nureyev sounds so amused that Juno has no difficulties glaring at him.

"I was looking to get rid of it."

 

\---

 

It goes on like that, another day, then another, or rather it doesn't go on like that, it gets more and more frustrating. They're balancing, still, on that knife's edge - who are we, what are we, where is this going. They're stepping so so carefully around all of the things that may blow up in their faces, but they can't just leave it alone for good.

Or at least Juno can't. Nureyev barely speaks to him, and when he does it's smalltalk, and when he's done with that he always has Mr Court to turn back to, and Juno tries to stop wanting and remembers that he is letting Nureyev do his job without even trying to figure him out.

He's not not trying, but he's not getting anywhere, so it doesn't count. He just watches, and he does confused aimless research, and he sits awake in the middle of the night thinking and thinking, and then he falls asleep with his head full of thoughts of Nureyev.

 

Mick has been aware from the beginning, of course, that something is going on that Juno isn't telling him about, but Juno spends so much time, now, watching suspiciously and jealously when Nureyev talks to Quentin Court, that apparently he missed Mick deciding that he has had enough once and for all.

"You're in love with Earl Grey," he says to Juno, like he knows what kind of answer he'll get but is determined anyway.

They've been watching a bad show and gradually getting sleepier and sleepier in their complaints about it, there was absolutely no warning signs and Juno feels ambushed.

"I'm, no," Juno says, indignant, "no, what the hell, Mick."

Earl Grey isn't Peter Nureyev, Juno isn't lying as much as he is being deliberately obtuse, which to be fair he would be even if Mick had said the right name, and Mick knows that, so it's even less convincing than it would otherwise be.

Mick sighs and switches off the tv.

"I don't get why you're being like this about it."

"Like what," Juno says. "About nothing, there's nothing happening."

"There's a lot happening and you're pining like nobody's business and it's giving me a headache," Mick says, "And I don't get why you're not doing anything about it. There doesn't seem to be anything terribly wrong with him."

He really does seem to believe that, because Mick is perceptive here only because he knows Juno, and still looks at Nureyev and only sees Earl Grey, who does seems significantly less horrible than a lot of other people Mick has seen Juno be stupid about.

"There's nothing wrong about him except that he's awfully interested in Mr Quentin Court," Juno says. Awfully invested in some kind of job that Juno wouldn't like if he knew about it and likes even less not knowing anything.

"Oh," says Mick, and his face softens so quickly that Juno doesn't have time to know what's coming, "oh, J."

Juno flinches and replays what he said and how it sounded and dislikes it immensely.

"That's not what I- you know what, no, forget it, you've got it in one."

He doesn't really feel like explaining all of the things Mick doesn't know about the man who isn't actually Earl Grey and his entire history with Juno - there's no way to say it and not have it turn into a whole complicated conversation. So jealousy it is. As good an excuse as any, and not... entirely untrue.

"I don't think he's interested in Quentin like that," Mick says.

No shit, Juno thinks.

"Really," Mick continues, "I don't think he is, and he looks at you a lot."

Juno has a job, here, and it is to figure out what Nureyev's job is, and he can't get distracted by his feelings or his silly hope that Nureyev still feels the same or his even sillier hope that he'd get another chance and it'd work out this time.

He can't.

"Just, drop it," he tells Mick, "just drop it, okay?"

"Okay," Mick says. He doesn't sound like he thinks it's okay, not really, but he does drop the subject for now, and switches the tv back on and lets Juno have his space to feel like an idiot.

(Juno feels like such an idiot.)

 

\---

 

He's a private investigator, he is going to investigate this if it kills him.

Of all the cases he has ever had, this may be the one least likely to actually kill him, but that's not the point. The point is that he will figure out what Nureyev is doing.

Luckily, the number he needs is still in his most recent calls - he never got Rita to save it for him, and he wouldn't know who else to call if he didn't have the number.

Juno starts pacing before he even hits the call button, walks back and forth between the bathroom door and the bed, a considerable distance, multiple times, and then he hits the button, holds the comms to his ear, and refuses to cross his fingers.

She picks up after only two rings.

"Alessandra Strong", she says, businesslike.

"Heyy," Juno says, "Alessandra, could you call my secretary and ask her to-"

"Juno," she says.

She sounds angry and maybe tired and maybe just a little bit relieved. He expected the first one, should have expected the second, and is thrown off by the third. Feeling guilty about having made her worry was not in his plan for this conversation.

He clears his throat.

"Yep. Now could you-"

"No," Alessandra says, "no, you dragged me into your mess, and I didn't make it out of there in one piece and I thought you were going to die in the desert, frankly, so you are going to explain to me what happened and then you're going to explain what you want and why, and then I'm probably going to yell at you and tell you you're an idiot."

In the space between her picking up and now, Juno has somehow stopped pacing and started fiddling with his eyepatch instead. As soon as he notices, he stops that and starts pacing again.

Explanations. He can do that, he hopes.

"Some criminals picked me up because they wanted me to do a job for them, and they removed the eye for me."

Silence, for several seconds. Juno paces. The carpet is fancy enough that it'll either collapse under this assault immediately or withstand it for longer than any carpet should. He idly wonders which and if he'd get in trouble if it's the first.

"Why is everything in your life like this," Alessandra says.

"Honestly?", Juno says, "This is barely in the top five."

Alessandra snorts, not amused.

"Yeah, I don't want to know. What did you want, Steel?"

Juno slows his pacing and sits down on the bed when he passes it on his next round, and he still doesn't cross his fingers.

"I had to go on a holiday, but something's come up and I need Rita's help, except she definitely won't do anything for me while I'm supposed to be on holiday. Someone else though..."

"Right," Alessandra says, "and you think that, what, I should call your secretary and pretend I'm just calling for myself?"

"Yeah? She's had weirder things happen, she'll be okay, tell her I told you about how good she is at researching stuff."

There's another pause. Juno starts fiddling with the bedsheets.

"This is incredibly stupid," Alessandra says.

Juno snorts, now.

"Isn't it always. But seriously, there's something weird going on on this... luxury cruise ship or whatever, and I'd really rather know about it than just wait for it to go bad. There's... I would really rather know more about the people involved."

"I'm sorry, Steel, but if you're on a luxury cruise, and I'm not even going to ask about that, half of them are probably people you can look up on your own."

"I already did that," Juno says. "And I'm definitely missing necessary information. I'm pretty sure there's at least two criminal operations underway on this ship, and I'm missing important information."

"I'm not your secretary," Alessandra says. "Make your own phone calls, Steel."

She sounds very final, and done with him.

Neither of them hangs up.

"Do you intend to make a habit of calling me?", Alessandra says after a moment.

"Why would I," Juno starts, reflexively, just because of her tone.

"Juno. Are you going to keep calling me when you need back-up, are you ineptly making overtures of friendship, what do I have to prepare myself for?"

"I'm not intending anything," Juno says.

He isn't. He thinks.

Can a lady not call an acquaintance, he thinks, without being accused of ulterior motives.

"Fine," Alessandra says, "Are you going to stay alive long enough to find out if you're wrong about that?"

Up until a few weeks ago, the answer would've been "probably not", but now it isn't and Juno still doesn't know what to do with that.

"Yeah," he says, "Maybe?"

"Good," she says, and hangs up.

Juno doesn't know if that went better or worse than expected.

 

\---

 

The next stop in their itinerary comes much too soon for Juno, but is otherwise entirely different from the first.

It's an inhospitable red planet's fourth moon, on which domes much prettier than the ones on Mars curve over streets and between buildings too tall and broad to even be described as towers anymore, glass and metal everywhere; the reason to go there, Quentin Court informs Juno, is to go shopping.

Juno and Mick don't have the funds for anything like that, because they're not actually supposed to be on this cruise.

At least Juno doesn't get sick in the shuttle this time. He knows, now, what to expect.

When they're standing outside the spaceport and everyone's starting off in different directions, Juno doesn't wait until he has to justify himself to anyone, he just steers Mick into the first street that looks unpromising and finds them an overpriced café to wait this out in.

It's not terrible, all things considered. The café is the same as all other ones on all other planets and moons, and they're alone, and Juno can breathe.

He's feeling better, properly better, it surprises him when he realizes it, but he is; until they rejoin the others to fly back to the Countess Cathleen and the empty seat next to Juno in the shuttle is occupied by Mr Court.

"We lost you earlier!", Mr Court says, like that's a tragedy of an inconvenience. "It was a much less fun trip than I thought it would be, we lost Earl for a whole half an hour too, can you believe it?"

He can believe it, actually.

Juno glances over to Nureyev, who is sitting next to Celia.

He isn't looking back at Juno, so Juno can stare at him and narrow his eyes at the way he looks too happy with himself, and Juno can look him up and down and see that he's got his hand resting on his coat pocket as if he's afraid something's going to fall out of it, and Juno can put two and two together.

"Sorry," he tells Mr Court, "better luck next time?"

 

\---

 

They get back to the Countess Cathleen and Mick's already in his room when Juno, fumbling with his keycard, sees Peter Nureyev at the end of the hallway fiddling with the lock of a door that Juno is pretty sure says "employees only" in big red letters.

Which isn't a surprise, and Juno should leave it alone maybe, or be smart about it, but as he always does, he makes the worst possible decision. He gives up on the keycard, just puts it back in his pocket, and strides down the hallway.

"What are you doing?", he demands as soon as he is within hearing distance.

Belatedly he realizes that he's got his hands on his hips and is speaking too loudly and making a fool of himself, but Nureyev, as always, is unfazed.

He takes Juno by the elbow and starts to steer him away from the door, then seems to think better of it and lifts the doorhandle just so to let them both into a smaller, darker hallway, in which they won't be seen and won't be interrupted, Juno assumes.

He lets himself be directed into the hallway and stuffs his hands in his pockets as if he'll find a solution there, or more resolve.

"Now," Nureyev says when they're both inside and he's closed the door, "what did you mean just now, Juno?"

He says it like this is just a friendly conversation.

"Stop saying my name like that," Juno says, almost angry suddenly. He doesn't mean to say it out loud, but there it is. The way Nureyev says his name is too much, and Juno needs to concentrate on getting answers.

Nureyev raises an eyebrow, but he looks a little bit hurt. Juno has to look away.

"I'm sure that wasn't it," Nureyev says after a moment.

Juno, even though there's no danger, wants to grab for and hold on to a gun that he isn't carrying and that would be of exactly no use to him, just to reassure himself; this is what he should be doing, Nureyev has a job and Juno also has a job.

"You're here to steal something, I'm assuming," he gets out.

Nureyev shrugs one shoulder.

"You know me."

"What are you stealing?", Juno says. He's getting louder again. "Aside from keycards and rings and Mr Court's dignity. What are you getting at? What's your big plan?"

"Oh," Nureyev says, and then he pauses to study his nails before he looks back up at Juno and smirks, all masks in place again. "I see. Why do you think I would tell you that?"

He starts walking further into the staff only area, as if that's the end of the conversation as far as he's concerned, turns a corner, whistles a quiet tune.

Juno could leave, could open that door again and leave this alone.

He follows Nureyev.

Nureyev's working on another door, at the end of another hallway, and Juno strides down that hallway, too.

"Really?", Nureyev says, straightening up and abandoning the lock for now, "Is this really necessary, detective?"

Juno crosses his arms.

"Apparently."

They glare at each other for a moment.

Juno's almost glad Nureyev is angry at him finally, like he should've been the whole time. It's familiar territory, safely within the realm of what Juno expects from his life. And Nureyev has had every right to be angry at him ever since Juno left a hotel room months ago.

Nureyev sighs.

"Look-"

Somewhere around the corner, the door they shouldn't have gone through opens with a jarring noise, and footsteps start approaching.

Juno rubs his hand over his face.

"We're not supposed to be here."

"You chose to follow me," Nureyev says, as exasperated as he can be at a whisper, and tries to open the door he's standing in front of. "If I had been alone, I would have been in and out at this point, or at least I would've gotten somewhere less conspicuous."

The door doesn't open, and they both know there's no time for picking any locks, no matter the skill of the lockpicker.

Juno waits, resigned.

"My apologies," Peter Nureyev says, so quiet Juno can barely hear it, and then he can't hear anything over his own heartbeat, because Nureyev has taken a step closer where there was no room for even half a step.

Nureyev's hands are on Juno's shoulders and briefly on his face and then link behind his neck, and it takes Juno a moment to notice that Nureyev isn't looking at him. He gives the impression of doing it, in the way his head tilts, but he's looking out of the corner of his eye down the hallway, where the footsteps are approaching.

Someone in uniform turns the corner, and Nureyev leans in a bit further.

Juno leans, too, but that's where they stay, a breath away from each other, pretending to be caught up in the moment and waiting for the confrontation.

"Hey, I don't think you're supposed to be here." It doesn't sound too convinced, but that's good for the two of them, Juno supposes.

Nureyev moves like he can't quite tear himself away from Juno.

(It's good that he's the one to move away, because Juno doesn't think he could have.)

"Oh!" Nureyev makes himself sound a little breathless. "I apologize, I don't remember quite how we got here."

Juno makes some kind of noise.

The lanky boy who stumbled upon them looks out of his depth, and Juno would feel sorry if he weren't relieved about it and very busy feeling sorry for himself.

"I, just," the boy says, "Just go back to the passenger areas, I guess. This is an employee only area."

"Oh," says Nureyev, again, "of course, have a good day."

And he grabs Juno by the hand and drags him down the hallway, still too close to him.

 

They make it out of the staff only hallway with no further incidents, except that Nureyev looks annoyed about his failed plans and Juno can't think about anything but kissing him.

He remembers it so well, but he doesn't think he could ever remember it well enough to not want the real thing anymore, and now that he's been reminded what it feels like to be about to kiss Peter Nureyev, the ache is back, a little like it felt after Rex Glass.

Nureyev drags him around the corner, and stops touching him as soon as they're out of sight. Juno follows him silently out through the door with the red "employees only" letters.

"Again, my apologies," Nureyev says, and when Juno doesn't respond, he says, "Juno?"

Juno looks at him, at his still-and-again familiar beautiful face and his bright eyes looking intently back at Juno, and then he has to look away immediately.

"Juno?", Nureyev says again, and he sounds regretful, and he's saying Juno's name like he's not sure he's allowed to but still the way he's always said it, like there's something about the name that makes him have to linger just a little bit every time, and Juno wants to kiss him.

He wants to kiss him so badly, and he remembers vaguely why he ended up in front of this door in the first place, but he wants to kiss Nureyev.

He wants to kiss him, so he does.

Nureyev kisses back without hesitation, but not like he expected it, and that's something that's never happened when they kissed, before, and his hands go to Juno's waist just as Juno gets his hands in Nureyev's hair, and then one of them must have elbowed the door because it slams closed next to them, but Juno barely notices.

They stay there for what feels like an eternity, a jubilant moment in which nothing matters, until another door clicks open and they jump apart and everything comes back to Juno.

"I'm sorry," he says, "sorry, you've got a job to do, we shouldn't-"

He doesn't know himself if he means that the job means Nureyev shouldn't or if it means Juno shouldn't, but he can't, he knows that much, he feels that much, and he backs away without looking at the expression on Nureyev's face and flees to his room.

 

\---

 

It's just another memory of a kiss that never went anywhere, he tells himself, a hundred times, sitting with his back to the bedroom door because he can't look at a hotel bed right now, it's going to be another memory like the others, regrettable in all the wrong directions.

He should stop thinking about it, really he should, and maybe he should just do something unrelated, anything at all.

Probably he should.

He doesn't want to get up, so he doesn't, he just sits there, and he doesn't see time pass because outside the window is just empty, dark space.

Maybe this wouldn't be so bad, he thinks, after a while of staring blankly and thinking the same half-thoughts again and again, maybe this wouldn't be so bad, and it's ike a late-night revelation except he's pretty sure it's not later than eight, if he had managed to figure out the crime by now, because then at least that wouldn't complicate his feelings in addition to everything else.

That's not how anything works, he knows, but he really wants it to work, and either way it's something to do.

He calls Rita.

"Mr Steel," she greets him, suspicious.

"Hey," Juno says, "Sorry to bother you, but-"

"No," Rita says, as decisive as she ever was, "You're on holiday, Mr Steel! You're supposed to be having fun, this is not the time for work, and if you're calling me to do work, I'm gonna hang up right now because you're on holiday and I'm watching a marathon of this show I haven't seen since I was 14, they're finally doing reruns, can you believe-"

"Not calling about work," Juno says.

She stops.

"Oh. What is it, then?"

"I need some more fashion advice, and Mick sure as hell isn't going to provide that," Juno says. It's not entirely a lie. "And there's a lot of people on this cruise who are probably important, and I don't know who any of them are, and I don't want to step on any toes. Metaphorical ones, that is. Not too worried about the literal ones, noone's asked me to dance yet."

"Well if noone's asked you to dance you definitely need fashion advice," Rita says.

"Right." He doesn't know if she's going to be suspicious if he insists on information, but he does need that information. "And the people? It's not too many, I swear it's not going to take you long, I just don't want to put my foot in my mouth with these people."

"God," Rita says, "the world is so unfair, you get to go on cruises and befriend all these rich beautiful people and I'm watching reruns of a show that, turns out, isn't great if you're not 14 anymore."

"Sorry," Juno says. "You just gotta make sure you win the cruise next time."

She huffs an outraged breath somewhere further away from the comms than before.

"Alright," she says, "who is it I gotta look up?"

There's the beeping of her computer in the background, and Rita is humming quietly, and it's nearly the same as being back in Hyperion City and doing a job, and Juno feels like he's on the right track for the first time since he went on this cruise.

"Ah, Mr Quentin Court and Ms Celia Court," he says, "They're twins?"

He can hear Rita typing.

"Alright," she says again, fully concentrating now, and then, "Oh, she's pretty!"

Juno sighs.

"Yeah, well-"

The comms beeps an extended high note into his ear and cuts off the call, and he nearly drops it.

No connection, it says on the screen, not nearly apologetic enough.

"Damnit," Juno says.

He vaguely recalls, now, mentions of their route taking them through a rough patch of space in which signal may not go through.

"God fucking damn it," he says again, with feeling.

 

\---

 

Juno is in Nureyev's company nearly every minute of the next day, somehow.

They're never alone, because the whole reason they're in the same room is that they're with other people, there's no way for them to talk, and Juno doesn't think he could have that conversation even if they were alone.

He doesn't even know what that conversation would be.

Sorry I ran away, sorry I regret every decision I ever make, please ask me again even though you probably don't want to, even though we both know it's going to end badly again?

Anyway, the point is moot, because there's people around them - Mick is in a sickeningly good mood, and Celia is watching Juno and Nureyev closely, and there's always Quentin Court, who Nureyev is still not done with, it seems, but Juno is tired of trying to figure out Nureyev's plan.

He probably should keep trying, all things considered, because Celia seems to have caught onto something, and she's looking at Nureyev very suspiciously when he talks to her brother, but Juno is just done, right now. Let her notice something's going on.

Quentin Court hasn't noticed anything odd, and doesn't know how to read the room, and is nearly as unwarrantedly happy as Mick.

"It's a small world, isn't it?", he says, genially, to Juno, in the early afternoon when they're both watching Peter Nureyev make his way across the room to get more sugar for his coffee.

One of them is watching Nureyev, the other is watching Earl Grey.

Juno hums noncommittally.

"I just mean," says Mr Court, undeterred because he is unobservant, "what with my meeting Mr Grey on the first day, and you meeting my sister, and then it turns out you and Mr Grey knew each other."

"Technically Mick met your sister," Juno says, barely listening anymore.

Mr Court laughs.

Time passes so, so slowly, waiting for something without knowing what it is.

Juno looks at Nureyev a lot that day, as he has been doing, and he's never looking back, but Juno can feel him looking sometimes when Juno himself is talking to Mick or otherwise occupied.

He has no idea what expression he would see if their eyes met.

 

\---

 

The missing connection to anything at all, including the internet, has everyone so grumpy that some genius decides to have the first of the journey's gala evenings that day, two days earlier than planned.

It works, kind of. Most of them are less grumpy after the announcement.

Juno gets more grumpy.

When he mentioned dancing in a joke to Rita, he had forgotten about these evenings, and he doesn't want to dance, or watch other people dance, or put on a pretty dress and sit waiting hopelessly for someone to ask him to dance who has every reason not to.

He puts on the dress anyway, and leaves his room mostly on time, and lets Mick and then Celia compliment him on the dress - Mick does it out of habit, mostly, but he does mean it, because he's Mick Mercury, and Juno is glad to have him here even as he wants to be anywhere else.

Really, anywhere else. He would take the Martian desert over this. But he's here, and there's nothing to be done about that, so he sits in his corner and watches.

Nureyev, as beautiful and inscrutable as always, dances with Quentin Court, and then laughingly once with Celia, and then with Quentin again, and Celia dances with every beautiful woman brave enough to ask her, and Mick doesn't dance because he's bad at it and claims it makes him dizzy, and Juno doesn't dance.

He avoids it easily, by virtue of not having a designated partner and glaring at anyone and anything near him, but somewhere, he realizes that Peter Nureyev has been looking at him intently for the past few minutes, and Juno knows what's coming, for once.

There is nothing that could make Juno ready for this.

He could've hidden, probably. There's large wardrobes on this ship, he could've avoided Mick ever finding him and convincing him to be present for this. But it's too late for that.

"Would you care for a dance, detective?", Nureyev asks when the previous dance comes to an end, and he doesn't just ask, he bows a little and holds out his arm for Juno.

Juno freezes.

He looks, out of the corner of his eye, at Mr Court, who seems to be in over his head in a conversation with his sister, at Mick Mercury, who has managed to strike up a conversation with the bartender that the bartender isn't participating much in, at the door, which is far away.

"Juno?", Nureyev says.

"I," Juno says, "yeah, okay, fine."

For a second the thinks about refusing Nureyev's arm, but that isn't going to change anything except that they'll look awkward on their way to the dance floor, so he takes the hand Nureyev is still holding out and tries not to think about how surely Nureyev's fingers close around his, and tries not to hold on too tight, and lets himself be led across the room.

The music starts before they've quite arrived, but it only takes them a few more seconds to get to the dance floor, and Nureyev knows what he's doing, and suddenly there's more points of contact, and they're looking right at each other.

Juno hasn't danced in a while, (and he isn't thinking about that, he isn't,) and he was never very good at it even when he still did, just passable enough to not embarrass himself or his partners, at least not with his dancing, but any lack of skill on his side is being made up for by Nureyev.

To Juno's relief, noone pays them any mind, because noone else knows the weight of the history here, noone else knows that Juno's heart is in his throat, except likely Nureyev, and Nureyev doesn't talk while they dance. They just move, the same steps over and over, Nureyev's hand on Juno's waist, while the music goes on and on.

It's already more than Juno thinks he can bear.

He doesn't know what to make of any of this, Nureyev being here with him, the way their conversations have been avoiding what happened entirely. He doesn't know what to make of his own feelings (they're still the same, they've been the same, but what use is that, considering), and he doesn't know what to make of anything Nureyev says or does - not that that's a new development.

"Juno," Nureyev says, "I would be very thankful if you could stop being distracted before you step on my toes. I like these shoes rather a lot."

Juno blinks and looks at Nureyev, who looks bright-eyed and fond, but both of those could be tricks of the light, and unbearably beautiful, which is unfortunately not a trick of the light.

"Right, sorry," he says.

They continue in silence.

It's a small eternity before the song is over, and Juno spends all of it looking at Nureyev, who looks right back, steadily and patiently without looking away.

"I missed you," Nureyev says, just when the music builds towards ending. "I'm not going to make you talk about any of this, but I wanted you to know that."

Abruptly, the music ends, and is replaced by the quiet noise of shuffling feet and laughter and conversation, and Nureyev's hands let go of Juno and are replaced by nothing at all.

Juno feels like someone hit him over the head.

 

\---

 

He spends the rest of the evening so distracted that Mick asks him if he's okay multiple times before they go back to their rooms.

"Yeah," Juno says, invariably, "yeah, I'm fine."

Juno doesn't talk to Nureyev again in that time or even see him, and when he goes to bed he can barely sleep for the uncomfortable mixture of relief and giddiness and absolute panic spreading from his tired brain into his too-tight ribcage and his slightly shaky hands.

By all rights, this shouldn't be happening to him, he thinks, and he tosses and turns and thinks, this is the third chance, noone ever gets more than three chances.

It's a miracle that he's getting a third chance, that he's getting a chance again, and this time there's weeks from the question to the worst part of the decision-making, because noone will be leaving or thinking about leaving until the cruise is over, and maybe he'll get more than one night, this time, before he ruins things for himself.

I missed you, Nureyev said, and Juno wants to rewind and be able to say "me too" fast enough to avoid this waiting, because he did miss him, of course he did.

He doesn't know what he's going to do when the cruise ends, but he doesn't have to care about that just yet, and maybe, probably, he can make himself not care about anyone's job including his own for long enough to have this.

It's a holiday, he's allowed selfish happiness for that limited time.

 

\---

 

The morning after, Juno wakes up like he's been awake and tired the whole time, and then Mick decides they're going to have actual breakfast outside of their rooms for once, and Juno follows him to the restaurant on unsteady autopilot.

"Would you look at that, you're deigning to join us for breakfast," Celia Court says, amused, when they approach the table she's sitting at with her brother and with Peter Nureyev pretending to be Earl Grey, and Juno should've known this was what having breakfast would be, but somehow he didn't, and Mr Court jumps up to pull a fifth chair over to their table.

Mick and Juno sit down, with a bit of maneuvering, and try to figure out the logistics of having a proper breakfast on a cruise.

"I'm glad to see you," says Nureyev, quietly, where he is sitting right next to Juno, who is sitting in the fifth chair directly where the table leg is.

Juno clears his throat and shuffles around in his chair and with his chair, and says, belatedly,

"Me too."

He's answering two things here, and he hopes Nureyev knows it, because Juno's stomach is trying to drop out of him and he feels like anyone who looks at him even briefly can see about two dozen breakfast-inappropriate emotions on his face.

Judging by the way Nureyev smiles at him, he, at least, can see all of those emotions.

"I'm glad," he says again, and then, "What are your plans for today?"

The question is addressed to Mick too, but when Mick shrugs and starts listing options he is considering but not settled on, Nureyev looks back at Juno and raises his eyebrows, and Juno feels overwhelmed and like he may be dreaming still. It's like there's noone but them in the room and it sort of feels like everyone is looking at them.

"There's no plan," Juno says. He wants to put his face in his hands and take a minute or sixty to breathe. "I'm open to suggestions."

"Indeed," Nureyev says, looking inordinately happy, and then he goes back to his breakfast.

Juno, with no other option, does the same.

 

\---

 

Unfortunately, while they were busy behaving like everything's normal, the rest of the table has decided to make plans together, and if there was ever a way around agreeing, the window of opportunity has come and gone.

Juno looks helplessly at Nureyev, who shrugs and smiles at him, a tiny private smile that's only a little bit a smirk, and very carefully moves so he can tangle his feet with Juno's under the table.

He doesn't look as sure about it as he has looked about much bigger things in the past, until Juno shakily smiles back at him, and then his smirk returns.

"I didn't even know they have a movie theater on this ship," Mick is saying, loudly, and when Juno looks over at him to break eye contact with Nureyev, he can see Mick gesturing widely in a way that will probably end with his elbow in someone's food. "I should've spent more time reading up on things!"

Nureyev's ankles are resting against Juno's and it shouldn't be as distracting as it is, but it's Peter Nureyev so of course it is, of course it's distracting, and Juno is trying desperately to be less noticeable in his distractedness than he suspects he is.

"Well, this way you have a pleasant surprise," Nureyev tells Mick.

Mick grins at him.

"It's just pleasant surprise after pleasant surprise on this trip!"

Juno makes a noise and Nureyev turns to look at him again with bright eyes and one corner of his mouth curling up in anticipation.

"So it is," he says, "I didn't expect it to be, but so it is."

In the months that have passed, Juno had forgotten what this is like, and there isn't even the convenient distraction of imminent death, and there's people around them, and in the end he coughs and looks away because as dangerous as Nureyev is in murder investigations and car chases and too-short moments of stolen time, Juno feels much more out of his depth here, where nothing will explode and noone is about to leave.

 

Noone is about to leave them alone, either - breakfast and conversation carries on into second breakfast, and then they move, finally, and Nureyev has to untangle his feet from Juno's, and Juno thinks maybe this is when they can find a moment alone to talk, but Quentin wants to play chess against Earl Grey and Celia is laughingly anticipating someone's embarrassment and Mick is tagging along because he's having fun, and Juno follows because he doesn't know how to be separated from Nureyev, right now.

What ends up happening is that Earl Grey loses several chess games just barely, good-naturedly, while appearing to hold a conversation that is carried mostly by Quentin alone.

Quentin Court, for all he does seem to be not entirely incompetent, isn't observant at all, and Juno is immensely grateful for it, because anyone even halfway aware of the people around him would notice the way Juno and Nureyev are gravitating towards each other, and Quentin just... doesn't.

Mostly, Juno has to admit, the credit for their staying under the radar for now goes to Nureyev, or more accurately Earl Grey, who is still a mask firmly in place, except for the moments when Nureyev drops the persona for a moment or two and smiles at Juno or just looks at him in a way that makes Juno remember exactly how he got himself into this situation, starting from when he met Rex Glass, which seems like a lifetime ago.

Remembering Rex Glass is strange and still a little overwhelming, and Juno thinks, distractedly, that whether he knows it or not, Mr Quentin Court is very lucky to have Earl Grey instead.

Juno, in turn, can't believe he could be lucky enough to have Peter Nureyev, still, again, but here Nureyev is and he goes to sit next to Juno when Celia demands her chance to show her brother that there's still people better than him at chess.

Mick is squinting at the chess board like that'll make him suddenly understand rules he has spent decades confused about, but he looks at Juno meaningfully when Nureyev sits down, and Juno grimaces a little and turns away, towards Nureyev, away from the reminders of layers and layers of complication.

Nureyev is smiling at him again.

"Are you really that bad at chess?", Juno asks him, low enough that noone else will hear, and Nureyev laughs just as quietly.

"What do you think?"

"I don't think I've seen you win any game," Juno says, blurts out before he can reconsider if that's a point they're at again, if he's allowed to acknowledge their history as carelessly as that.

Nureyev looks delighted.

"You've seen me win plenty of games, Juno."

Oh, of course. Juno really isn't used to this anymore, and he clears his throat and wills his face to stop feeling like it's burning.

"Literal games."

"Those aren't literal games either. Really, you should know that."

He's still smirking at Juno.

Mick coughs, and all at once Juno recalls the company they're in and how close together they've moved, and he tries to move away without looking guilty, but he suspects he looks most of all like a terrible, terrible fool.

 

By lunchtime, Celia is definitely suspicious of Nureyev, even though he for once isn't even stealing things, and Mick is definitely suspicious of Juno, who is still distracted. More distracted with every minute that passes, and increasingly distracted by his own doubts instead of just being distracted by Nureyev.

He doesn't know what he's doing, he's out of his depth, and most of all he doesn't know what he's thinking, falling into this again when it will go wrong again and still isn't a thing he can have, and there's still all the same reasons why it won't work.

He isn't sitting next to Nureyev this time, and Mick is telling everyone about their childhood adventures like he's forgotten he's talking to the rich children of rich parents, and Juno is fidgeting.

Time is passing slower and slower. It feels like time is about to grind to a halt, and Juno has been waiting hours, at this point, for a moment alone with Nureyev, waiting for a moment to talk at the same time as he is dreading the talking itself.

It's getting to Nureyev too, he's pretty sure, but Nureyev manages to hide it better than Juno - not from Celia, but Quentin hasn't noticed that Nureyev is distracted. Earl Grey is still there, and still mostly as he has always been.

Nureyev looks away from the conversation he's been having with Quentin and smiles at Juno, just for a moment.

Juno smiles back. That's all they have, for right now, and it has to be enough.

 

The big plan for the day was to watch a movie, so after lunch, and a coffee, and endless talking, they file into the smallest movie theater Juno has ever seen, and Juno ends up between Mick and Nureyev. (Probably not by chance, but it looks enough like it.)

Nureyev turns to look at him when they're all comfortable, and raises his eyebrows, and doesn't say anything, and Juno looks back and feels his face heat up again.

Really, time is passing more slowly with every endless second that passes.

When the light is dimmed and their movie starts, Nureyev very carefully puts his hand on top of Juno's on the armrest, and it takes Juno a minute to turn his own hand around to tangle their fingers, and then they stay just like that.

Juno doesn't register anything about the movie, except that both Mick and Quentin talk over it.

When the credits roll he pulls his hand back to himself, reluctantly, and then the lights go back up and he blinks confusedly and doesn't know where to look and stays in his seat even when the others start getting up.

He does get up when everyone else is starting to leave, and stumbles a little over his own feet.

Nureyev is hanging back, standing just next to the door and waiting for Juno while everyone else is moving elsewhere, and when Juno reaches the door, they're alone in the room.

Probably in a minute or two someone will throw them out, or someone will come looking for them, and there's no time to start a conversation, there's just one moment to look without looking away.

Nureyev looks like he wants to say something, and outside, the voices of Mick and Quentin avidly discussing something neither of them knows anything about are moving slowly further away.

Time stops, finally, after having been slow and unbearable all day.

"Juno," Nureyev says, just that, just his name, very softly.

They really don't have the time to say anything, to start saying things, even if Juno knew what to say, they have only a minute here until someone wonders where they are.

He kisses Nureyev.

They don't have time for that, either - a second later someone laughs outside and they're standing three feet away from each other before Juno has even fully processed it.

Nureyev sighs and then laughs a little, and says,

"Later."

Juno clears his throat and puts his hands into his pockets.

"Yeah."

 

\---

 

Later is much later, after one of the longest dinners of Juno's life, but when the day is finally over and they've said goodnight once like it didn't mean anything, Nureyev knocks on the door of Juno's room.

There's a moment in which Juno can't move, because he doesn't know where to go from here and it might not even be Nureyev and either way he doesn't want to know, and it seems preposterous to try again, for Juno to get another chance and make the same bad decisions again.

But he wants to try again, he thinks.

He wants, in any case.

Juno takes four long steps towards the door and turns the handle and pulls, and in the dark hallway outside the door, Peter Nureyev is waiting.

He steps in as soon as the door is open wide enough, and Juno pushes the door closed mostly on autopilot, always know when an open door is going to be a risk, and there's a heartbeat in which they aren't looking at each other yet, and then Juno turns around.

"Juno," Nureyev says.

Juno leans back against the door because his legs feel like they might give out on him.

"Hey."

He doesn't know where to go from here, but Nureyev smiles, a little shaky, and closes the distance between them until Juno, still leaning against the door, has to look up to meet his eyes, and they have time now, and a closed door, so Juno kisses Nureyev again.

It feels like stolen time anyway, but that's alright. Everything good in Juno's life feels like stolen time, because it is.

At least they have a lot of stolen time now.

They separate at some point, not far, but far enough that they can catch their breath.

"I'm glad I met you again here," Nureyev says, quiet and sincere and expectant.

Far enough to have that conversation finally, too, it appears.

"Well, it's been a mess so far," Juno says, and when Nureyev keeps looking at him, he clears his throat and looks away from Nureyev's face, at his shirt collar all lopsided and wrinkled. "Yeah, I. Me too."

Nureyev is always the one saying things, Juno is all too aware, always the one thinking there's something there worth saying, worth keeping, salvageable, possible at all somehow, and Juno just... keeps thinking he can take a step towards Nureyev when Nureyev has taken two steps towards him, and then he doesn't manage even that.

He wants to, he always wants to, but what's the good in wanting, in the grand scheme of things. Where has wanting ever gotten him, gotten everyone around him.

"Juno?", Nureyev says, "Juno. If this isn't what you want..."

"I don't know what I fucking want," Juno says, too loud and too bitter, surprising himself as much as Nureyev, except he doesn't think either of them is particularly surprised. "And I don't know what this is, either."

Nureyev takes a step back, and he's probably giving Juno space to breathe, and Juno can't breathe any better, but he can walk away from the door finally and into the room, and he means to sit down, but then he walks and keeps walking and then he's pacing.

"I don't know either, Juno." Nureyev is still standing there, and he's not quite watching Juno as he's pacing, but he catches his eye briefly, and Juno doesn't know how to read his expression. He sounds a little annoyed, or impatient, but he always sounds like that. "I thought that if you left, I would leave and forget you and that would be it for both of us and we'd never see each other again, but here you are and here I am, and I still feel the same, god knows why."

There's a reason Juno was dreading this conversation.

"I don't know!", he says, and he stops in his pacing and turns towards Nureyev and tries not to yell, but it's hard to talk about this. "I don't know why you do, I don't know what use it is that we're here because you'll have to leave and I'll... I am who I am, you can't expect- you can't expect anything."

"We have weeks left until either of us can disappear, Juno." Nureyev looks like he wants to close the distance between them, but he isn't, he's just holding his hands in front of him in the middle of thinking better of reaching out. "I'm only asking you for these weeks, because we have these weeks, we have so much time compared to our last attempt, and I missed you. And I hoped, foolishly maybe, that you would have me, for now."

"Foolishly," Juno says. There's other parts to the sentence, but this is what he's stuck on, and his hands are a little shaky and he tries to take a step towards Nureyev but barely manages half a step. "I said I was a fool, too."

"Are you?", Nureyev says.

He's started closing the distance before Juno can answer, but Juno nods anyway and reaches out for him and they fall into each other again.

Every kiss they've ever had has felt like a first and a last kiss all at once, and this one does too, except they do have weeks, and maybe it won't be a last kiss, and that doesn't make Juno any less desperate. He's wrinkling Nureyev's shirt even more, and Nureyev has his hand half in Juno's hair, thumb on Juno's cheekbone, and there's no reason for Juno to start crying, but sometime in between one kiss and the next one he does, and they've stumbled towards the bedroom and Nureyev lifts his other hand from Juno's waist to his face to wipe away a tear, and they stop kissing to fall onto the bed, all tangled up regardless.

There's no light in the bedroom except the light falling in through the door from the other room, and Nureyev's face is half in shadow and half very bright, where his head is on Juno's pillow. He looks as unfairly beautiful as ever, and he looks a little worried.

"I'm fine," Juno says. "I'm fine."

He doesn't know if he sounds fine. He doesn't feel fine. But not in a bad way, maybe.

Nureyev reaches out for him like they aren't already occupying the same third of a bed, like there's a way to pull Juno closer, and Juno lets him.

They stay there, quietly, for a while.

It's hard to process this, to imagine where this is going, what they think they're doing differently this time that'll somehow not lead to both of them getting hurt, but Juno does want to try. He wants, and there's as little danger here as there is ever going to be, and he has left Mars to go on a holiday, so maybe some of the rules about how things go for Juno Steel don't apply here.

"I thought," Nureyev says, at some point, quietly, "that you hadn't changed your mind, per se, because that doesn't seem like you, but that you had in a way come to your senses and realized that you never meant to say any of the things you said."

And there's the other part of this, the way it ended last time, the fact that Juno left after giving every impression that he wouldn't, but Nureyev sounds resigned rather than angry, if he sounds like anything at all.

Juno turns his face into Nureyev's shoulder and closes his eyes.

"I never lied to you," he says, as clearly as he can manage with his frantic heart and his tired voice, "and I never changed my mind about how I feel."

Nureyev sighs and lifts a hand from Juno's back to run his fingers through Juno's hair.

"I have met you. I do know you, a little. There's a million plausible reasons I could come up with why you would leave, one stupider than the next, but with anyone else it would've been this one, and I kept coming back to it."

There's no easy answer to that, so Juno stays silent, head still on Nureyev's shoulder, Nureyev's hand still in his hair, where it is by some miracle of slow gentleness not getting stuck.

Nureyev waits. Not with intent, but he doesn't say anything, and Juno knows he should be saying something but it's been hard to say these kinds of things for a long time now, and it won't become easy suddenly just because it would be convenient, to say something without making it a grotesque mockery of the underlying feelings, to say something that isn't a gauntlet thrown in one way or another.

"I really do... feel the same," Juno manages, at last.

He can feel Nureyev hesitate for a moment and it nearly makes Juno panic, as if all of this could've been a misunderstanding or a dream or Juno's imagination, but then Nureyev slowly, almost with inexperienced clumsiness, presses his face into Juno's hair.

"I do, too."

 

\---

 

Juno wakes up in a hotel bed next to Peter Nureyev.

He hasn't slept well, but he has slept; the alarm clock next to the bed tells him glowy and green that it's nearly six in the morning, and the light from the other room is still on and falling onto the bed in the cheapest possible imitation of a sunrise.

It's too much, to stay lying there, and Juno sits up and rubs at his dry eyes.

He feels restless, and he doesn't know what to do. There's no choice to be made, and there's nothing Juno has to go and do, and Nureyev is still asleep with the blankets half covering him and half drooping onto the floor, and his hair looks like a mess in the way hair looks like a mess in the morning, no traces of sand or blood or... anything.

"Juno?", Nureyev says, hesitant, before he's even opened his eyes.

Juno feels his stomach tie itself into knots, and he clears his throat twice before he can say anything.

"Yeah. I'm here."

He doesn't know why he's the one who yelled yesterday, because he's not the one who has a reason to be afraid here; it was Juno's fault that it didn't work, the way to make it work is for Juno to be less what he is, there's nothing more to it.

Or maybe there is, but even then they have time, for once, and Juno wants to try.

Nureyev blinks open his eyes and looks at Juno like Juno Steel's guilty face is the best thing he could possibly have woken up to, and the light from the other room is falling onto his face again and making his eyes look even brighter in the otherwise dark room.

"Juno," he says, like a sigh, and, "Good morning."

"Good morning," Juno says.

He still can't see a way for this to not end badly, and even though he feels less desperately like running away now that he's slept, he also remembers much more clearly all the ways this is complicated and impossible and wrong.

"Having regrets yet?", Nureyev asks, and sits up, too, cross-legged and turned towards Juno, and his tone has gone unaffected and bright and teasing again, which isn't quite right, Juno thinks. He doesn't know this man as well as he maybe should with how he feels about him, but something about his voice is wrong right now.

There is a choice to be made here after all, and it's too early in the morning and too safe and quiet to confront life-long habits, but Juno wants to try, for once.

"Not more than yesterday," is what he settles on, not enough, but it'll have to do.

"Well, that's encouraging," Nureyev says, but he sounds more like himself, and he leans forward to kiss Juno, softly, briefly. "Am I allowed to come back this evening, then?"

Is he allowed to come back that evening. And the next one, probably, and the one after that, and there's nothing to lose here, Juno can see a future here, at least a few weeks of it, that is bright before it goes back to winding endlessly down, and he doesn't have to do anything but say yes.

There will be decisions to be made weeks from now, of course, and it'll all go to shit, and Juno will be left with nothing, but he remembers, life can wait for one night, and he's already running away from his responsibilities and himself and all his mistakes he will go back to after this holiday.

"Yeah," he says, "yes, please."

Nureyev smiles.

"I get to look forward to that, then."

He untangles himself from the blankets and reaches past Juno to the nightstand where he put his glasses, and then he starts climbing out of the bed.

"Do you have to-" Juno clears his throat, again - it's early in the morning, his throat is dry, "Are you leaving now?"

There's no reason to believe this is an ending, because they just agreed that it wouldn't be, Juno is very sure that they did, but Nureyev is leaving and suddenly it's hard to believe that he'll come back.

Nureyev stops and raises his eyebrows at Juno.

"Would you like Mick Mercury and Quentin Court and Ms Celia Court and whoever else on this ship cannot keep their noses out of other people's business to find out about this today?"

That... makes sense, actually, when Juno manages to wrap his panicked brain around it. He doesn't know why he didn't think about that.

"Yeah, no," he says, "I can live without that, thanks."

"I figured as much," Nureyev says, and then he gets up off the bed at last, gets dressed with an efficiency that Juno can't comprehend this early in the morning, and starts towards the door.

He turns around after a few steps, goes back towards the bed where Juno is still sitting in a pile of blankets and squashed pillows, and leans down for another kiss. It's meant to be a short kiss, probably, but it lingers, and Nureyev is smiling widely when he pulls back.

"I'll see you later," he says, and then he strides out of the bedroom and through the main room, opens the door just a little, peers out, and then he's through the door and the door closes behind him.

"See you later," Juno says.

He's smiling, too, he notices. He feels giddy, almost, underneath the background noise of disbelief and anxiety. It's early and he's awake and he doesn't feel half-dead. A quarter dead, maybe.

It seems strange, this careful thing, after the all-or-nothing of the other times, it seems unbelievable that Nureyev would offer him this without asking for decisions or forevers, but they do have time until that's necessary. It'll hurt, of course it will, when it's time for the leaving again. It'll hurt, but Juno wants it to be worth it. Or maybe he just wants, for now.

There's a knock on the door.

Not the door of the suite, Juno realizes after a moment, but the door connecting his room to Mick's.

"Hey, J, you awake?", Mick says, muffled through the door. "I heard some noise, please tell me there's no burglar in your room."

Not anymore, Juno thinks.

"We're on a cruise ship!", Juno yells in the general direction of the door, "Why would there be a burglar in my room on a damn cruise ship, Mick."

He kicks off the blankets and marches towards the door to pull it open.

Mick shrugs at him.

"Things happen to you," he tells Juno, and pushes past him into the room. "Anyway, if you're awake, do you want to get breakfast early?"

 

They get breakfast so early that they don't meet the Courts or Earl Grey, which Juno is a little grateful for, because he doesn't think he would know how to behave in that situation right now. Other than that he's... feeling okay? This might be the most relaxed Juno has been at a meal for at least a week, and Mick must pick up on it, because Juno somehow ends up watching the terrible show again that they started days ago, and he doesn't see the Courts, or Nureyev, until dinner.

It's a lot like the day before, when he does see Nureyev.

They smile at each other for a moment and then they keep to their separate conversations, distractedly, and Juno feels like his heart is going to beat out of his chest, and time passes slowly until they're done with dinner, and Juno nearly gets talked into going to a bar.

"I promise you people do actually have fun at bars sometimes," Celia says, laughingly, when she sees his grimace.

"Really, detective," Nureyev says at the same time, and Juno can see dangerously many of his sharp teeth when he smirks, and he says "detective" like it's an inside joke, "you could use some fun."

Juno takes a shaky breath and rubs at his face where his eyepatch hits his cheekbone.

"Yeah, I don't think so," he says, roughly enough that Celia looks a little hurt for a second, but Nureyev grins at him.

"Suit yourself," Celia says.

She's looking at Nureyev with a bit of a frown, like she's contemplating something. That's Nureyev's problem, frankly, and Juno isn't going to deal with it. He won't think about Nureyev causing problems for the Courts, so he won't think about Celia causing problems for Nureyev, either.

(His brain is otherwise occupied anyway. Peter Nureyev is enough to occupy all of his thoughts even without any of the attached trouble.)

"Sorry," Juno tells Mick and the table at large, after too little consideration, probably. "I've got a bit of a headache, I think I'm just gonna go to bed."

"Okay," Mick says, "hope you feel better soon!"

Juno nods and pushes his chair back to get up, and before he leaves the room, he glances at Nureyev again, who smiles at him and nods, barely perceptible.

The hallways are lit less brightly than they would be during the day, to pretend that days are passing the same way they do on planets, sunsets and all, and Juno walks slowly back towards his room and thinks about the waiting and what he's waiting for.

He doesn't think Nureyev will leave the others immediately, because it'd be conspicuous to go through all the effort of extracting himself from Mr Court's company just after Juno left, and because it's still early and maybe that's not what this is, maybe that's not the kind of time Nureyev wants to waste on something that's at best a compromise and at worst just the inevitable disappointment.

Either way, Juno will go to his room and he will find something to keep himself busy with while he waits, and later, probably much later, there will be a knock again, and Juno smiles to himself, just a little.

He's still smiling when he gets to his door, and while he searches in his pocket for the keycard.

There's no keycard there.

"Oh, goddammit," he says.

Behind him, Nureyev laughs, a quiet delighted thing.

"Looking for something?", he asks, and then he's standing so close behind Juno that Juno can feel the laugh as a breath on his cheek, and Nureyev puts the keycard in the lock and pushes open the door.

Juno takes the keycard back and puts it in another pocket.

"Was that necessary?", he asks, "Really?"

Nureyev pushes him inside the room and closes the door behind the both of them, and when Juno turns and looks up at him, there's the smirk again.

"It was certainly entertaining."

Juno sighs, but every answer he has to that seems too harsh for this moment that is still so fragile, so he kisses Nureyev, and Nureyev sighs his own sigh into it, almost like he's relieved.

They really don't know how to do this, Juno thinks. They have no idea how to do this when there's no plan, no certain death, no impossible things to ask of one another. They're too strange a pair, and too odd as individuals, and there is no past experience Juno can pull from to navigate this, because he has never done anything right in his life, and then... Juno is the only one who knows Peter Nureyev's name. They're both of them lost, here.

They break apart.

"You're thinking," Nureyev says, just an inch away from Juno still.

"Sorry, happens sometimes, it'll pass," Juno says. He knows his tone missed the mark because Nureyev's face softens just a little.

"Would you like to... talk about what you were thinking about?"

"Nope."

"Alright."

Nureyev doesn't sound disappointed or annoyed, just patient and understanding and a little resigned. Juno doesn't remember if he was like this before, this willing to be soft, this willing to wait. The mere thought that Peter Nureyev might change, might stop for someone like Juno, the mere thought of it feels like a ridiculous thing to think, so Juno pushes it aside, and then he immediately goes back to it, and it still seems disgustingly self-centered of him to even consider it.

"How do you know this isn't a terrible idea," he asks Nureyev, "What do you think is going to happen this time? We'll just do the same thing again, it'll take longer maybe, but it's just going to be the exact same thing."

"Does it feel like a terrible idea to you?", Nureyev asks him, and then, like he's angling for a joke, "Am I a terrible idea?"

"You know you're a terrible idea," Juno says, and just like that they've left the uncertain terrain of a serious conversation and Nureyev is smirking and pulling Juno in again, both hands on Juno's hips.

"Do I?" he says. "I think you should tell me more about that."

 

\---

 

They wake up next to each other again.

Well.

Nureyev wakes up first, gets dressed without any fuss while Juno is still mostly sleeping, and then he sits back down on the bed and shakes Juno's shoulder gently and Juno groans and yawns and doesn't open his eyes. He likes sleep, when he can get it.

"Good morning," Nureyev says, quietly, and "g'mornin" Juno mumbles back, and opens his eyes a little and then, "I'll see you later?"

"Yes."

Juno falls back asleep nearly before he hears the door open and close, and he dreams a confused sequel to his amused imaginings of how Nureyev is sneaking back to his own room and will, later, pretend they haven't spoken since the previous evening.

 

He's going to have to do the pretending on a shuttle down to a planet, because in the bubble they've started building around themselves, in their orbiting around each other, they've both lost track of time apparently to the point that Juno didn't know it was time for another planet.

Even the name of the planet elides him.

"Was this planned for today?", he asks Mick, irritated, when Mick has thrown him out of bed and is talking about a planet visit like Juno should know what he's talking about.

"Yeah?", Mick says, "It's in the schedule and everything, we talked about it at dinner yesterday?"

"Damnit," Juno says, "okay, fuck, fine, are we having breakfast?"

It's too fast, he isn't ready to do this, he can't go to a new planet with Peter Nureyev when he still doesn't know what they're doing, he can't go to a new planet with Peter Nureyev and a whole group of people and pretend everything's normal, when this is going to be nearly what was supposed to be and they've just started again.

He'll be thinking about a lost future the whole time, and he'll look at Nureyev and know he's thinking about the same thing.

"We're leaving in half an hour, less probably, now," Mick says, "and you're not even dressed."

"Right." Juno doesn't know where yesterday's clothes went, but clean clothes probably won't hurt. "So, no breakfast?"

Mick makes a face.

"Coffee if you're fast, I guess? Sorry."

They do manage the coffee, and it's good coffee but Juno doesn't ever drink good coffee and he has to drink it too fast and too hot, and then they arrive at the shuttles just in time, and Juno drops into the first free seat he sees and considers falling back asleep. The worst hasn't even started yet and he already feels like he got run over by a truck.

He still doesn't know where they're going.

Across the aisle from him, Mick has found a seat and, apparently, an acquaintance.

"Good morning!", he says, and "good morning" says Celia Court, who, Juno looks over, is sitting just behind Mick, with her brother next to her. When she sees him looking over, she raises her eyebrows.

He was a little rude to her yesterday, probably, Juno thinks. He wouldn't be bothered by that if he didn't have to spend several more weeks in her company.

Where's Nureyev, he thinks, almost concurrently.

Nureyev, Earl Grey should be sitting next to Quentin Court, because that's where he sits, because that's where he has a job to do, listening and laughing and flirting.

Juno wants to be relieved that Nureyev isn't talking to Mr Court and that Nureyev maybe isn't going to be on this planet with him, but he isn't quite. They have only weeks, and Juno will probably mess everything up before then, and he doesn't want to go a whole day without seeing Nureyev.

"Good morning," Nureyev says, quietly, next to Juno, and Juno can see Celia still which means she can see him, but he turns around so quickly it makes him dizzy.

Peter Nureyev is right there in the seat next to Juno's and he looks like he's slept enough even though he's slept less than Juno and he's leaning against the window and he's smiling and he's beautiful and he's next to Juno in a shuttle headed for a planet Juno knows nothing about.

"Good morning," Juno says.

He can hear how he sounds, breathless and ridiculously hopeful, and he knows Nureyev can hear it, too.

Nureyev tilts his head a little like he's considering something.

"Excited for today?"

Juno snorts a laugh and taps his fingers on the armrest between them.

"I... don't know where we're going. So."

"Oh!", Nureyev says, like Juno couldn't have said anything better, like this is the best thing he's ever heard, and he leans towards Juno a little bit. "The planet is called Pearl N2. I've been here once or twice, but I suspect that the places we'll see today are rather different from the ones I've seen."

His hands are gesturing a little, still elegant even as he seems to be both excited and wary.

Juno can't look away from him.

"It's mostly ocean," Nureyev continues, eyes bright, "and the cities are, for the most part, underwater. I think the plan is to take another shuttle to go see the Singing Reefs, and then spend what's left of the day in Amphitrite, the capital of Pearl N2."

There's nothing Juno knows to say to that, and he can't do anything, here where everyone can see them. He wishes this were a success on the first or second try, instead of a tentative third attempt; he wishes they were alone, he wishes he could sit closer to Nureyev, he wishes Nureyev's hand twitching towards his didn't have to stop.

He wishes he knew a way to make this last, to stop them from hurtling towards the end again.

Nureyev is leaning close to the window to peer out, where a strangely green planet is getting larger and larger; Juno thinks he can spot the inhabited areas already, underneath stretched-out clouds.

"I didn't have time for sightseeing the last time I was here," Nureyev says quietly, turning back towards Juno. "It was a little disappointing at the time, there were some... unforeseen circumstances that kept me from staying longer, but I'm glad I get to see these places for the first time now."

He isn't saying "with you", but it sounds a lot like he wants to say exactly that.

 

The shuttle lands, only minutes later, at the edge of a city in the middle of an endless green ocean. The city seems small, above the water, but under the water there is a titan of a city expanding in domes and stretching out strange metal piers into the ocean that is pressing infinitely against the man-made structures from all sides.

They take an elevator to a lower-level shuttle port.

Through the transparent domes, Juno can see something that is incomprehensibly wide and mostly dark in a way that feels almost like the uncomfortable void of space, except there's, even this close to the city, life everywhere; things growing in uneven bright clumps on the support beams, schools of fish flashing briefly in the green-dark, something glowing further out.

It shouldn't be more frightening than Mars - the domes break, everyone dies - but it is, because it's unfamiliar.

The sign at the shuttle port advertises reef tours in big yellow letters, and because this trip has been booked for weeks, there's a shuttle waiting already, just for them.

"Are you gonna get carsick again?", Mick asks Juno.

"I don't get carsick," Juno says, and is one of the first in the shuttle, while Mick isn't done saying "uh-huh" yet.

Because it's made for carting tourists through the ocean, the shuttle doesn't look at all like the previous one. There's booths, almost, with semi-comfortable benches around flimsy, sorry excuses for tables. Juno drops into a window seat, and Mick sits next to him, and then there's Nureyev opposite Juno all of a sudden, with Quentin and Celia Court next to him looking equal parts excited and disinterested, somehow.

The shuttle pushes through airlocks into the ocean, and then they're floating in a tube of metal and plastic through too much water towards the reefs.

The pilot of the shuttle is also their tour guide, Juno assumes, because there's a mostly-indistinct narration of where they're going and what they're seeing, interrupted whenever they get close to the sharp rocks jutting up from the invisible ground far below.

Mick keeps leaning on Juno to look out of the window.

"Jeez, Mercury, how old are we?", Juno says, when he breathes in some of Mick's hair for the sole reason of there being a faintly glowing blue jelly-thing outside.

"Sorry," Mick says, cheerfully, and keeps his elbows one on the table and one on Juno's shoulder.

When Juno grimaces, he meets Nureyev's eyes, and then he stops grimacing and Nureyev smirks at him and stretches his legs underneath the small table into Juno's space.

He looks smug about it like he's had some grand, novel idea. Which he hasn't, but it's working, so he's probably right to be smug.

Juno shoves half-heartedly at Mick, but Mick is excited, and there's actually things happening outside now, entire swarms of those glowy jellies and something big moving as a shadow alongside the shuttle, and ahead of them, more shapes are starting to appear out of the dark, full of tiny lights.

There's actually a reason people go here, it occurs to Juno, just before the shuttle turns a little to rise up to where the actual, alive reefs are.

There's a reason, and it is this full, glowing, colorful structure rising up towards the sunlight under the surface, millions of living things reaching out and winding dream-slowly in the current, and everywhere glittering flashes of more life, more life, more life.

"Oh," Juno breathes, before he can stop himself.

"I know!", Mick says, directly into Juno's ear, "I know, isn't it great, look at that plant, look at that creepy fish staring at us!"

Juno looks. He isn't pressing his face to the window, but it's a close thing; Mick would be pressing his face to the window if he were sitting in the window seat.

"Aren't you glad I won a cruise and invited you," Mick continues, as smug as he can possibly be while he's also vibrating with excitement.

Juno jabs his elbow into Mick's ribs, but it doesn't move Mick even a little, so he gives up and sighs and glares at Mick and says, with too much fondness for his own comfort, "Could imagine better company, actually."

Mick grins at him.

"What, did you have better offers? Anyone else offering you a free tour of the galaxy?"

Nureyev, with his feet still underneath Juno's seat, ankles nudging against Juno's, coughs to cover up whatever other noise he started to make.

"Yep," Juno says.

It's enough like a joke for Mick to ignore it, but it's still a stupid thing to say. It feels too big to acknowledge, and then he's said it and it settles heavy between his ribs and reminds him of... everything.

 

\---

 

The reef tour continues to be beautiful, but there's that reminder sitting at the back of Juno's mind, and then they go back to the city and move on to exploring that, and somewhere right after lunch, Juno grows morose.

That's how days go, that's what life is, but he had forgotten, a little.

It's getting towards evening and he's in a labyrinthine silver casino in a metropolis on an ocean planet and he feels like he has an entire rock in his stomach weighing him down and cutting him up, and he's restless and everything is full of twinkly noise and lights and laughter and he shouldn't feel like this in this place but there's nothing he can do about it.

Not long now until they leave, he knows, but until then he's stuck here watching Nureyev in his element next to Quentin Court, balancing a drink and a conversation and an elaborate game he's winning by losing in the right way, all brightly shining as he does, and Juno is sitting watching unseen in a dark corner fidgeting with an empty glass.

"Nah, he's just like that," Mick says, half-behind Juno. "Grumpiest lady I've ever met."

Celia Court laughs.

"Really? He's usually like this?"

Juno turns around, equal parts annoyed to be torn out of his bubble and relieved to have a distraction, to fall into suspiciousness and directionless faint anger.

"Yep," Mick says and grins over at Juno, before the smile drops, unsure, off his face when he sees whatever expression he can see on Juno's face.

It's time to be Juno Steel again, private eye, fuck-up, the kind of person who doesn't belong here.

He can do that easily. He could do that in his sleep.

"Come on," Juno says, "I'm usually worse, noone's had to punch me yet."

Celia raises her eyebrows at him.

"Do you get punched a lot in your line of work?"

"It's my personality more than my job that gets me punched, actually."

Mick's face has scrunched up into nearly-displeasure, and all at once Juno notices how much he's slouching defiantly against his seat, how his hand wants to twitch to where a gun used to be just for reassurance as if it'd still be reassurance, how loud his voice got just then.

Nureyev has pushed away from the table he was leaning over and is looking at the three of them with a slight wrinkle between his eyebrows.

"Come on, J," Mick tries, and Juno snorts.

"Am I wrong?"

"Well, I haven't found you too unpleasant on this trip, detective," Nureyev says, and somehow that makes Mick go less tense and both Mick and Celia go back to their own conversation, because they only heard Earl Grey defuse this situation enough that they can flee from it.

Juno doesn't want to have this conversation, he thinks, but his mouth and his turned-around stomach and the disgust at himself want to have this conversation in the worst possible way. Five minutes ago he thought he could be happy this time, and now he's back on familiar ground.

"Give it time," he says, and he can feel his grin turning ugly, and when he turns towards Nureyev he can see Nureyev looking disappointed and resigned, as he should, as he should.

Juno is quiet enough that he won't cause a scene, he's pretty sure. He doesn't want to cause a scene, he just wants to get this over with, suddenly.

Nureyev is quiet enough that Juno can barely make out what he's saying, when he answers.

"Will you? Will you give me the time to find out?"

And just like that Juno is untethered again, unsure of his place in the universe, and he wants to yell at Nureyev and he wants to cry, maybe, and he doesn't know why he's getting another chance, because Nureyev is right, Juno didn't give him time to find out just how neverendingly unpleasant it is to be in Juno Steel's life. He thought he'd have proven without a shadow of a doubt, when he left, that there wouldn't be a happy ending, and here Peter Nureyev is, trying again, asking Juno to try again.

They have weeks left on the cruise. There's no big decisions just yet, and more importantly, Juno doesn't think he could stay away from Nureyev for the rest of this trip if he tried.

He could try, of course, he could say no and he could hide in his room and he could tell himself that it's for the best, and days, maybe only hours later, he would see Nureyev across a crowded room or at the other end of an empty hallway, and Juno is selfish and stupidly hopeful at heart, or maybe he just wouldn't be able to resist the temptation of making this hurt more.

It shouldn't be hard to say yes, with that decision made, except saying yes would feel like a lie, because any promise Juno Steel makes is a lie.

"We've still got some time before it's back to Mars," he says.

"We do."

Nureyev doesn't look happy. Why would he. He doesn't look like he's feeling much of anything, and he stays there with Juno for another few moments, waiting, and Juno doesn't say anything, and then Nureyev sighs and goes back to his game and to Mr Court, and Juno goes back to his own thoughts.

 

\---

 

Despite everything, when they're back and the artificial sunset on the cruise ship has passed and Mick has gone to bed and Juno is pacing and pacing in his room, there's a knock on the door.

It's a quiet, careful knock, and when Juno opens the door, Nureyev doesn't step inside immediately.

"Am I still welcome?", he asks, like it's somehow not obvious that Juno is relieved and terrified and full of bitter longing.

Juno wants to nod and leave it at that, but he opens his mouth, and then he can't stop himself from talking.

"I'm sorry," he says, and it's rushing out of him as if Nureyev is going to be gone any second now even though Nureyev knocked on his door and asked for permission to come in, "Have I said I'm sorry? I haven't said I'm sorry, and I really should have, for leaving and for being a liar and for all of it."

"Juno..."

"Why are you here?"

Juno's still standing in the door, and Nureyev is just standing there in front of him, looking tired.

"Can I come in so we can talk? If you don't want this anymore, that's-"

"What's there to talk about?", Juno says, fast, bitter, loud in an empty dark hallway, "I fucked up, I'll fuck up again, talking won't change that."

He isn't thinking, he is not thinking, if he thinks he will be wrong and also he will be right, so long as he talks without thinking he can be proven wrong and also he won't have to listen to Nureyev or to his own head.

"Juno." Nureyev looks so, so tired, in the dark, and he sounds, for just a moment, as desperate as Juno feels, and that's not how it should be, and then he straightens up and pushes against the door to open it further. "I intend for this to work out. If you will let me, I intend to find a way to make this work. Can I come in? Will you talk to me?"

"You're-" Juno doesn't know anything, but he steps back when Nureyev takes a step forward, to let him into the room. "Why are you here? What have I ever done to make you think there's something to salvage here?"

Nureyev lets the door fall closed behind him and takes another step towards Juno, slowly, determinedly.

"You trusted me. You told me you loved me, not in those words, but you did. You looked into my head and whatever you saw in there didn't make you turn away from me, you... Juno, I don't know if this is going to work out, but I don't think calling it unsalvageable is fair just yet."

Juno crosses his arms.

"Didn't work out last time. I left, Nureyev, I don't get why you're not angry about that!"

"I was," Nureyev says, "And I was disappointed and I was hurt and I didn't get over it and to all appearances you're feeling a lot of the same things, so why, why can't we start over? Neither of us will run and neither of us will ask the other to give up his whole life, and maybe this time we'll get it less wrong."

Juno is staring at him numbly, he knows, and he knows he should answer, but he can't, he can't imagine seeing that future, he doesn't know how to try, because he will fail, he has always failed, and this is so much more complicated than the many easy things Juno has made a mess of.

"You can say no," Nureyev says, "and I will leave and we can forget it, but forgetting hasn't worked out so far."

He sounds so calm, so steady now, as sure as he has always been.

Juno huffs.

"What, third time's the charm?"

"I want it to be," Nureyev says. "Beyond any logical reason I can tell you, I just want to be with you for longer than a daydream, Juno."

And that's the scary part, and that's a way of phrasing it, and Juno wants to start crying again and he wants to be kissing Nureyev again and he wants more than a daydream, too; of course he wants that. But the daydream was always what made it safe, and this isn't safe, and this is going to end badly.

"That's going to be a disappointing experience."

"Is that a no?"

Nureyev sounds like he's genuinely asking, like he genuinely doesn't know what Juno will say, and maybe that's because this is a new kind of question. Even when he asked Juno to leave Mars with him, the question didn't carry this much weight. They have neither of them only just escaped death, they are both alive and awake and aware and this isn't about running away from everything or ignoring the world for just a night, this is... Nureyev is offering Juno something, Juno thinks, but that can't be right, but...

"No," Juno says, through a lump in his throat, "it's not."

And that's enough of an answer, finally, for Nureyev to stop standing at a distance, and he takes that last step forward just as Juno sways towards him, reaches out, and Nureyev's cologne still smells as it ever did and he kisses Juno.

He kisses him softly like he's still asking something, like he doesn't want to presume, like there's a need for slow and gentle, maybe even like there's something that deserves care, here.

Juno doesn't remember how to kiss without despair.

He wants to remember it. There's so much to resolve still, so much that will go wrong, so much that can't work, but when Peter Nureyev intends for something to work, Juno has no choice but to follow.

Nureyev pulls back without moving more than a breath away from Juno, and he's still looking a little serious and a little tired and very, very hopeful.

"Can we talk? About how this can work?"

Juno looks away from him.

"I don't know, can we?"

"Right," Nureyev says, "right, Juno Steel doesn't talk if it would be convenient. Can I talk? Will you listen?"

He sounds a little fond, underneath the sigh and the eyeroll, and when Juno nods, he pulls him towards the sofa and sits both of them down.

Juno doesn't know what to do with his hands, or his feet, or any part of himself; Nureyev, feet up on the sofa, looks at his own hands and is silent for a moment and then another.

"I'm in love with you," he says, finally, "And we both know that's not enough in itself to make this work, but it's the reason I want to try. I gave you my name, and then I thought that would be enough, and then it wasn't and I didn't know why this immense thing wasn't enough, but I've had time to realize, Juno, that we won't get anywhere if all we're willing to give each other is grand gestures and declarations."

I have nothing else to give, Juno wants to say, I've thrown it all away and burned it and lost it and some of the things other people can give are things I've never had. This burned-out broken husk has nothing else to give, except what noone wants, but that plentifully.

"I don't know what else," he says, "I don't know how you- I don't."

"I'm not asking you for the stars, Juno. I'm not asking you for sacrifices, or a perfect happy ending, or the ideal of romance. I just want to be in your life. I just... give me something, anything, Juno, that isn't an empty promise."

Juno rubs his hands over his face and keeps himself from kicking the coffee table and keeps himself from laughing or crying.

"I have nothing but bad habits and bad days and bad memories to give, Nureyev."

"Then give me those."

Before he can register that he's doing it, or figure out why he's doing it, Juno is shaking his head, vehemently, desperately.

"You don't want those."

"Did you not listen," Nureyev says, exasperated, "when I said I want this for real and not for daydreams?"

Juno snorts. Everything he's seen of Nureyev has been daydreams made real, impossible things, unlikely coincidences stacked precariously with effortless grace, and always escapes before gravity came back on.

"It's still a daydream, whatever you're imagining. You know that, you know I couldn't be part of any of the lives you lead."

He would if he could, but he can't, he still can't, he had to break that promise once and he will break it as many times as he makes it.

"Will you allow me to be part of your life?"

No part of that makes sense.

All of what Juno is and does is static, repeating, stuck in the same places and on the same people and weighed down by history, and Nureyev moves always, because he needs to in every way a man can need to move. They collided once, twice, thrice, but collisions are all they'll ever get, each devastating, because Juno will stay and Nureyev will move on.

"How."

"However I can. There's time to figure that out, Juno."

Juno doesn't have an answer to that.

He's starting to let himself be convinced, he knows, he's letting himself be pulled into what Nureyev says isn't a daydream but will turn out to be just as impossible as the first two futures he offered Juno, just as impossible and still just as tempting, just as much a thing Juno longs to reach for and have and keep, and Nureyev is looking at him with bright eyes that promise that this time will be different.

"Please?", Nureyev says.

There's a carefulness there, a steadiness, this time, and Juno doesn't know if that means anything will go better than before, but...

"Okay," he says, and when Nureyev has smiled at him, relieved, and he has smiled back, shaky, and it's getting embarrassing, "Can we stop sitting on this sofa now? Are we done with couples therapy?"

It's a bad joke that implies more than Juno intended, but Nureyev laughs and leans towards him.

"We can."

 

\---

 

Artificial first rays of sunlight wake Juno up, and his first thought is a confused memory categorized quickly as a strange dream, because he can't believe any of Nureyev's promises still, and maybe he didn't make any of them in the first place, except then Juno sits up and Nureyev is still there and is looking at Juno warily.

"You're not running away, are you?"

"You're here," Juno says, dumbly.

They stare at each other and Juno doesn't know what to say and for once Nureyev doesn't either, it seems, and then Juno falls back onto his pillow.

"Of course I'm here," Nureyev says.

Juno doesn't tell him that he thought he might've been a dream, but there's other reasons why he wouldn't be here, all kinds of reasons readily available, and they're confirmed when Juno looks at the clock.

"You left earlier than this, the last few days."

"I did, didn't I." Nureyev is smiling, like he's laughing at Juno, just a little. "And if you're that worried about someone finding out, I can leave, but I rather thought I could have a lie-in."

"No, I." He's stumbling over his words, and Nureyev is still sleepily amused and Juno doesn't know why. "I assumed you were worried about Mr Court knowing."

He's still jealous, he notices. Peter Nureyev said a lot of things to Juno that he meant, even if maybe he isn't going to mean them in a week or a month, and Juno is very sure that all of what he might've said to Quentin Court was a well-designed, well-dressed lie through and through, but Juno is still jealous. He's witnessed Nureyev doing his job, he knows what Nureyev does.

"And why would I be?", Nureyev asks.

This evasive, amused, distracting version of him is more familiar than yesterday's serious mood, but it's not helping.

"You have a job. You have some kind of plan, you're, there's something you're doing. If Mr Court knows, you can't. You're supposed to be Earl Grey, for Mr Court."

Juno is in bed with a criminal. Again.

"I don't think it'd be terribly out of character for Earl Grey to spend the night with someone, Juno."

Nureyev has raised his eyebrows and sounds genuinely confused, and it confuses Juno in turn, and he frowns.

"But you haven't- at least I think you haven't, you haven't... spent the night with him. And there's something you need from him."

It shouldn't be embarrassing to say, but it is, and Nureyev, who looks delighted, isn't making it less embarrassing, because he has never made anything less embarrassing.

"Oh," he says, and laughs, "Juno, dear Juno, do you think I only have one way of getting what I want? I would be a terrible thief if I only knew one solution to any given problem."

"Right," Juno says, "Right."

Nureyev pulls him close and kisses him, morning breath and all, and then he says, "In the interest of full disclosure, I did consider it, but there was a change of plans."

It's too early for this, Juno thinks, and, is this what it's going to be like, every day, until it isn't anymore? Is that what Nureyev was asking of him, conversations like balancing acts without safety nets? Juno isn't good at enduring things unless they're a punishment, and he can't bear the thought of not giving up, choosing to not give up every day, every hour, every minute, because there's no point, there's no point because Juno isn't ever going to be good at this, there's no point except that Peter Nureyev kissed him like it's just another kiss.

"A change of plans," Juno means to ask, but mostly repeats flatly.

"It seemed prudent to stop considering it, when it turned out I had you to consider instead."

It's too early for that, too; then again, Juno knows, in some hopeful corner of his mind, that Nureyev will say more things like this later, and Juno will be just as overwhelmed, without the excuse of an early morning.

He mumbles a half-answer into his pillow and Nureyev laughs again.

 

They get out of bed eventually, before Mick knocks or breakfast is over or Mick knocks to announce that breakfast time is nearly over, and they only get distracted a little in the process, and then Nureyev, put together and ready to pretend again, kisses Juno one more time and says, "we'll see each other before then, I'm sure, but - until tonight?", and Juno says "Yeah, yes," and Nureyev kisses him again and then he leaves.

And then Mick does knock to remind Juno of breakfast.

 

\---

 

Quentin Court, Juno thinks, baffled, upon paying attention, has no idea that Earl Grey could be anyone but who he says he is.

They're in the library, which is mostly a café except it has some bookshelves and armchairs, and Nureyev is all Earl Grey again, but Juno can see, now, that Earl Grey has lost all resemblance to Rex Glass, and whatever there might have been when Nureyev orchestrated a meet-cute is gone.

Mr Court is all earnest and enthusiastic, and Earl Grey is all genuine interest in what he's saying, and that's all there is, and it's mind-numbingly boring to listen to their conversation.

"Quentin really never did realize," Celia says, amused, when she's sat down next to Juno with her coffee, "what Earl meant when he said he was looking forward to spending this cruise with him."

Juno pulls a face, without meaning to. He hopes Celia isn't looking.

They're both watching Nureyev and Quentin absorbed in their conversation on the other side of the room, because there's nothing better to do, presumably, and because they can't uphold a conversation of their own without the help of Mick, who has disappeared on a quest for cheesecake.

Celia sighs and sips her coffee.

"I suppose that's very lucky, all things considered. He'd be heartbroken otherwise."

Juno doesn't know which part of everything she's figured our or thinks she's figured out, and he doesn't know how to respond and wouldn't know even if he knew what exactly she's implying. Probably at least part of that is intentional, because that's who Celia Court is.

Damnit, he thinks, and "uhm" he says.

Celia, smiling, taps a fingernail on the rim of her coffee cup.

"I don't know if Quentin didn't notice because he wasn't interested or wasn't interested because he didn't know he was being blatantly invited to be interested, he has ample history of both, but certainly Earl isn't interested anymore, and I suppose he must have a good reason for that."

It feels like she's looking at Juno expectantly, even though she isn't looking at him, and Juno hates it. He wishes Peter Nureyev were less complicated, but he's aware that his feelings are what they are partly because Nureyev is complicated. He also wishes Nureyev would stop talking to Quentin and come over and clean up his own mess, but he knows that's not going to happen.

Nureyev, without turning away much from Quentin, looks over at Juno and smiles.

"Yeah, I... suppose he must have. A good reason."

"I suppose, too," Celia says, after another sip of coffee, "that you might know more about that reason than I do, detective?"

"I, no?", Juno says, "he's, well."

"I see," Celia says.

She's so amused, and she's leaning on the arm of her chair like this is going exactly as she wants, and Juno doesn't know what he just unintentionally gave her and when it's going to come back to murder him.

"You could ask him about it," he says, annoyed, when she continues to be amused and expectant.

"I might, at some point," she says, "but for now he's awfully busy, isn't he."

Juno clears his throat.

He is, isn't he, Peter Nureyev is busy with his job, whatever that may be, and he's busy making impossible promises to Juno, and Juno doesn't know which one of these would be more inconvenient for Celia to know.

He clears his throat again. Celia is still waiting, but she seems to know there isn't going to be an answer, and then Juno is saved by the reappearance of Mick Mercury, empty-handed.

"Can you believe they don't have cheesecake," Mick says, and plops down in a free chair opposite the two of them, "there's a jeweler and a spa on this ship, but I can't get cheesecake."

"You'll survive," Juno says.

Celia laughs.

"Anyway," continues Mick, "what were you guys talking about?"

And if Juno got to decide, he would unconvincingly inform Mick that they weren't talking about anything, that it wasn't interesting, that it's not worth repeating, but it's out of his control, and Celia leans forward a little and puts down her coffee.

"I was just... wondering, a little, about a change in Mr Grey's behavior towards my brother. The detective says he can't solve this case for me."

Mick raises his eyebrows at Juno, who crosses his arms and glares, and after a few moments of staring, Mick shrugs apologetically at Celia.

"Gotta let a lady have his secrets, I guess."

"I don't have any secrets," Juno says, "Any anyway she was asking about Earl Grey's secrets, which we can't even be sure he has, so."

"Right."

"Well," says Celia, and then to Mick, "either way, what do you suppose Mr Grey is hiding?"

Mick scrunches up his face a little.

"Does he have to be hiding something? I mean, he probably is, but we probably all are."

Juno wants to laugh, but he rolls his eyes instead.

"Jeez, Mercury, do we have to get existential?"

"You're one to talk," Mick says, and he isn't wrong, but he's also siding with Celia whether or not he knows it, and Juno feels justified in making a face at him.

(He regrets the face when Nureyev looks over, but Nureyev just smirks at him and raises an eyebrow.)

 

\---

 

"Were you having an unpleasant conversation this afternoon, with Ms Court and Mr Mercury?", Nureyev asks, later, when he's knocked on the door of Juno's room and Juno has let him in and let himself be kissed and they've settled on the couch again.

"Don't think I've ever had a pleasant conversation with Celia Court," Juno says.

"I'm sure that's not true. She's very intent on being pleasant."

"Isn't she just."

They're silent, for a moment or two, and then Nureyev sighs.

"What are you worried about today, then?"

Juno, unsure how to phrase it, unsure how to communicate the direness of the situation, gets up and starts pacing, and Nureyev watches and waits as patiently as he is capable of, which isn't very.

"Juno?"

"She knows something," Juno says.

"I would assume she knows rather a lot of things, given her education." Nureyev is half-smirking, leaning back on the couch, the picture of unconcern.

"Would you," says Juno, gesturing at him, "would you take this seriously, for once! She knows there's something about you she doesn't know, and she thinks I know something about it, and you're going to be in a whole lot of trouble."

Another sigh, not quite patient.

"I doubt I am going to be in any significant or unexpected amount of trouble, Juno."

"What if she figures out whatever job you're doing, huh?" Juno points, waves his hands, paces, and he knows he isn't making himself more convincing, but he is making himself nervous all over again.

"I doubt it," Nureyev repeats, "and in any case, Earl Grey was never meant to last me very long. I would've made him less boring if he had been."

"No," Juno says, "no, she's... she thinks I know something about it, that's the part you should be worried about! You're going to be connected to me, and if she notices any of the other stuff, that connection is going to be a hell of a lot more dangerous for you than a throwaway identity becoming useless!"

"I was very much planning on being connected to you, Juno."

Juno stops short.

"And," Nureyev says, "I don't know how you think this would be worse than any other unfortunate incidents of connections made between aliases. I have been doing this for a while, you don't have to fuss, as touching as it is."

He's smirking by the end of that.

"Fuck you," Juno says, half-hearted and indignant.

Nureyev grins brightly.

"No," says Juno, before Nureyev can say what he was going to say, "no, stop that."

He sits down in the armchair closest to where he stopped pacing and rests his elbows heavily on his knees and rubs a hand over his face. This is exhausting and confusing and entirely foreign territory, and he's worried, and he doesn't know what to do.

Nureyev doesn't speak while Juno is looking away, and when Juno looks up again, he's looking softer, somehow.

"I know there are risks to being connected to you like I am not connected to other people and places, Juno, but I knew that when I first told you my full real name. Let me make this decision for myself, please."

"I- okay," Juno says, and, "Are you sure about this entire... thing."

"Yes. Yes, I am very sure about this entire thing," Nureyev tells him, "If by this entire thing you mean being with you, then yes, I am sure."

Juno nods, reluctantly. He knows Nureyev can see the reluctance, and he can see that he isn't entirely happy about it, but there's nothing Juno can do about that. He can't pretend, and he can't lie to himself about how likely it is that Nureyev will actually stay, he can only let himself have this for as long as it lasts.

"If you're quite finished doubting me," Nureyev says, amused, and gets up from the couch, and Juno looks up at him, and there's a knock on the door.

They both stop short and Juno frowns and Nureyev raises an eyebrow, and they wait, unsure.

"J?", Mick says, quiet enough that they can only just hear him through the door, "You still awake?"

It could be worse, Juno thinks. Mick probably already knows that Juno and 'Earl Grey' are... something. If he comes in, the world won't end.

He'd still rather he didn't, but he looks helplessly at Nureyev and Nureyev strides over to the door and opens it wide.

Mick, confused, blinks at him and then looks past him at Juno, and Juno sees the moment something dawns on him, because he looks like he wants to point a finger and talk a mile a minute and then he settles on cautious excitement instead, thankfully.

"Mr Grey. I didn't... expect to see you here?"

"And a good evening to you, Mr Mercury," says Nureyev, amused, and steps aside to let him into the room. He isn't moving a single bit like Earl Grey, and Juno wonders if Mick notices it at all.

"You're not with Quentin," Mick says, still standing in the doorway, not coming in, and he looks at Juno like he thinks Juno should have some kind of reaction or comment here, because, Juno remembers all at once, there was a half-conversation Mick misunderstood, he knew about Juno's jealousy, and now he seems to be... trying to be a good friend, maybe? Or, more likely, making fun of Juno for having been wrong.

Nureyev laughs, delighted, and looks briefly back to Juno.

"Surprisingly not, no."

That earns him a grin from Mick.

"Mr Grey-"

"Please," Nureyev says, and he turns his back to the door entirely and takes two long steps towards Juno to sit down elegantly on the arm of his chair, "no need for formalities, you can call me Peter."

Mick takes a step inside, then stops, closes the door.

He doesn't say anything for a few seconds, in which Juno thinks briefly about kissing Nureyev right in front of Mick, because that was some kind of grand gesture, and then thinks, just as briefly because it makes him want to run, about what this means - that Nureyev told Mick that Earl Grey isn't real, that Nureyev told someone part of his real name, that Nureyev told Mick, Juno's best friend. And then he does think about it for longer than a heartbeat and the panic sets in, and he doesn't know why Nureyev would do this, except to prove something to Juno about wanting to stay, but it's still stupid, and it's only Mick and it's only a simple first name, but-

"What was that for," he says, breathless, angry, "what do you think you're-"

"I think maybe someone should explain," Mick says, still by the door, "like, just in general? What-"

Juno waves a hand at him frantically, and for once he gets it and stops, and he's probably making some kind of face but Juno can't look because he's looking at Nureyev, at Peter, who is looking back at him calmly, questioningly.

"Peter," Juno says, because that's the name Mick is allowed to hear, and it's the first time he says it and it feels vulnerable in his mouth without the last name spit out behind it and it's such a little word and it feels like he has to, for once, not put artificial distance between himself and Nureyev, Peter, and suddenly he understands why Peter says "Juno" the way he does.

"Juno," Peter replies, quips, still a little reverent somehow.

Juno had something he wanted to say, other than his name, he's sure, possibly he wanted to yell whatever it was, but he's forgotten it completely and he suspects he's looking at Peter a little besottedly.

"Oh, gross," says Mick, with as much friendly annoyance as he seems to be able to muster in his confusion, "It would've been less gross if you'd just kissed him, honestly."

Juno manages, somehow, to look away from Peter, and Mick frowns at him.

"You're gross," Juno tells Mick.

"When you said you weren't in love with Earl Grey," Mick says, still standing there, "were you just being clever because Earl Grey isn't real?"

Peter has the gall to laugh at that, and he leans into Juno and presumably grins at Mick, Juno can't see, because he has a hand in front of his one remaining eye.

"Earl Grey does not... exist, as such, no. I can't speak for if Juno thought he was being clever."

"Hm." Mick sits down, finally, on the couch opposite them, and Juno looks up and sees him frowning and chewing on his lip.

It's understandable that he'd need to process, and it's understandable that if Peter is going to be in Juno's life he would have to in some way drop that particular charade, at some point, if both he and Mick stayed around long enough, but Juno doesn't like it. He doesn't like that it had to be now, and he doesn't like that it had to be like this, would have preferred, actually, a life-or-death situation in which there would've been no time for Mick to think about it and come to conclusions, would have preferred some warning maybe, and then. Then this is proof, maybe, that Peter plans to stay, that he does really and truly mean it when he says he wants to be part of Juno's life, that he's not asking for Juno to give everything up and on top of that he is giving up more of his precious anonymity, his safety net, for nothing but the faint chance of this working out.

"Hm," Mick says again, more decisively. "I liked Earl Grey."

"I'm getting a bit bored of him, myself," Peter answers, and, "I do hope I'm an adequate replacement."

He looks down at Juno from his perch on the armrest, and he's grinning with all of his sharp teeth, and Juno wants to kiss him and he wants to demand answers still and he wants to kiss him.

Mick makes some kind of noise.

"Why are you pretending to be Earl Grey anyway," he says, "Who does that."

"Do we have to have this conversation," says Juno, with a groan and a rising feeling of dread. "Like, do we really, really have to?"

Nureyev, Peter, sighs at him, indulgently.

"He did ask for an explanation."

"Right," Juno says, "fine, okay, go ahead, you know what you're doing, or whatever."

He hopes Peter does, because Juno wouldn't know where to even start explaining anything without putting Peter in danger or trapping both of them in a complicated lie Juno won't be able to keep straight.

"Why," Mick repeats, "are you pretending to be someone else?"

"Because circumstances require that I do." Peter sounds nonchalant still, but he's choosing his words carefully, and Juno can feel, because they're still on the same chair, that he has tensed up a little. Just a little, not enough that Mick would notice, but Juno can feel it, and it's reassuring, to know that he is being careful after all.

"Does he just like being mysterious," Mick says, accusatorily, to Juno.

"Yep."

"Are you a spy, then?", Mick asks, to Peter again, "Is your name just so embarrassing you don't want to use it? Are you on the run from something? Are you a secret agent?"

Peter smirks.

"Something like that."

"Right," Mick says, and he isn't getting less suspicious, and this is all going downhill because of course it is, and Juno doesn't know how to fix this, and Mick continues. "Okay, you're gonna tell me you're not who I thought you are but you're not gonna tell me who you are, that's great, big fan of that, is there anything you actually will tell me?"

"Oh, a great many things," Peter says, "but I'm afraid there are indeed also a great many things I will not tell you."

Mick considers that, for a moment, and while he does, Juno pushes back his hair and nervously pulls at his sleeves and looks up at Peter, who puts a hand on his arm and leans down to kiss his cheek.

"Right," Mick says again, and leans forward, elbows on his knees, business-like. "I'm going to be okay with that for now if you tell me how you met J. No lying. I'll ask him to confirm it and I'll know if he's lying."

"Come on," Juno says, "Really?"

He doesn't know if he's relieved because this is, comparatively, not the worst question, or panicked because it's not actually a harmless question.

Peter's hand is still on his arm, and he squeezes gently, once, then drops the hand to turn more fully towards Mick.

"Juno met me because I was sent to help him on a case, which I can't tell you much about, and that day was in many ways very unlucky, but.. we met. That was worth a lot of unlucky days."

Juno can hear the little choking noise that his own throat makes before he can stop to have a dignified reaction to that, and Mick looks at him judgmentally, and a little less suspicious.

"That's not really the answer I was hoping for," he says, after a moment.

Peter sighs, crosses his legs, leans against the backrest of the chair.

"I'm aware."

"Can we," Juno says, anxious and overwhelmed, "Can we maybe stop this conversation? I'm not really having fun, here."

Mick sits up a bit straighter, then deflates.

"Yeah, okay."

"I know," says Peter, careful, "that this must be strange for you, but I assure you that there are good reasons why I keep my name a secret, and I promise you that I care a great deal about Juno."

"Okay," Mick repeats, and Juno can feel a bit of the tension going out of his own shoulders, and Peter leans closer to him and rests a hand on his arm again, and they're all quiet for a moment or two.

Juno can feel his heart anxiously doing overtime for another few seconds, before it starts to stutter back to its normal pace. He still feels like yelling, kind of, but it's okay, he can deal with it.

"Anyway," Mick says, cheerfully, a little bit forced but not as much as Juno has been afraid he would, "is this some weird getting back together situation? You were pretty awkward when we all first met on this trip."

Juno snorts.

"You could say that," Peter says.

"If you're both in love with each other," says Mick, slowly, "Why did you break up in the first place?"

It's a loaded question, but luckily Mick is Juno's best friend and has seen Juno walk away from a thousand things and fuck up a thousand more.

"Well, you know me," Juno says.

Mick sighs, mostly for show, mostly to emphasize his eyeroll.

"Right. J, have you considered like... not?"

Peter laughs. It bursts out of him, surprised and inelegantly.

"Hey!" Juno says. "Have you considered being nice to your best friend once in a while?"

 

\---

 

Mick does leave shortly after that, with a very unfortunate eyebrow movement just before he closes the door behind him, and a reminder that for everyone else, Peter has to remain Earl Grey.

"That went better than I expected," Peter says, still on the armrest of Juno's chair. "I thought I'd have to explain more, even to someone as... easy-going as Mr Mercury."

"Think you can call him Mick," says Juno, quietly, easy answers first, "if he gets to know your name. Wouldn't try Mickolas just yet, but."

Peter starts to laugh, then stops before he's gotten past the first breath.

"Are you alright?"

No, he isn't. No, he isn't, because he still can't believe that Peter would make an effort to be with him, because he still can't imagine a real future for them, but Peter Nureyev is Peter now, isn't he, and he's made himself vulnerable for Juno, and Juno is trying and failing to explain that in any way that won't require believing that someone would want to be with him enough to...

"No," he says.

"Did you... not want Mick to know that we're-"

"No, no." That's not the issue, Mick suspected that anyway, Juno didn't want to have to talk to him about it, but he has to have unpleasant conversations daily whether he wants to or not, and this one at least wasn't the kind of trainwreck Juno makes of most conversations. "Why did you- your name."

"Half of a name. Not even half, really, a first name is nothing, in the grand scheme of things."

He doesn't sound like it's nothing. But he sounds calm about it still, and not like he regrets it, and not like he thinks he will regret it.

Juno breathes, but every bit of air in the room is determined to stay right where it is.

"Peter..."

"And I do get to hear you say that now," Peter says, softly, "which would've been worth it even if it had been more than nothing."

Probably, Juno thinks, Peter is looking at him, but Juno can't look up just yet.

"I don't," Juno says, still at a loss for... anything. "This is all going to blow up in our faces, and I'm used to things blowing up in my face, but it's going to be a lot more dangerous for you, and I can't- I can't."

He can't handle the consequences of that being his fault, and he can't imagine the future Peter thinks might be worth all this, or he can, he can, if he lets himself, but he can't let himself. It feels like he would be taking something that isn't his, stealing someone else's happy ending like there isn't a reason he doesn't get one of his own.

"You can't."

Peter sounds hurt, and disappointed, and like he's trying not to sound like he's either of these things.

"I can't ask that of you," Juno tells him, because that's it, that's the sentence he's been looking for, even if Peter offers him a future, offers him compromises, freely, Juno feels like he's asking him to give up things he shouldn't have to give up and take risks he shouldn't ever take, and he doesn't have the right to do that.

He would like to, he would love to, he wants desperately, but there are things he deserves and there are things he doesn't.

Somewhere, dimly, he's aware that it wouldn't take as much anymore to convince him that he does deserve this as it would've taken the last time, but it's not yet little enough for him to convince himself.

"I can't," he repeats, states. Matter-of-fact.

In one fluid movement, Peter is off the armrest and in front of Juno, dropping to a knee to look at him, exasperated.

"Juno. I will tell you once more, and I would appreciate if for once you listened, this isn't an unspeakable risk, or an unspeakable sacrifice. I am aware of what I'm doing, and you don't have to ask anything of me because I am asking you."

If anyone walked in right now, Juno thinks, a little hysterically, they'd take one look at the two of them and assume Peter was proposing. It's ridiculous, in every possible way, that Juno has managed to get himself into this situation.

"There is never," Peter says, quieter, "going to be a perfect solution, there is never going to be an ideal time or place for us, and I'll stop asking if you say no, and I also will stop asking at some point if you can't say yes, but right now I am only asking you to believe that I know what I want."

And that, at last, if he takes it out of its context, is easy to believe, because Peter Nureyev always knows what he wants.

"I do believe that," Juno says, and then he looks at Peter finally, and Peter looks... relieved.

"I'm glad," he says.

Juno is glad, too.

He hopes, far away in a corner of his mind where he can't pick it apart and make it wrong, he hopes that these little pieces he can believe will be enough for this to work, maybe, but he doesn't want to jinx it, so he can only look at the thought out of the corner of his eye and leave it there, for now, to grow.

 

\---

 

"So", Mick says, when he sees Juno the next morning, "did you sleep well?"

"I haven't slept well since I was three." Juno fires back on autopilot, and his shoulders feel less tense than they have in a while, and Mick huffs.

"You know I was actually-"

"Yeah, yep, I'm aware," Juno says, quickly, but he wants to smile. "Fuck off."

They're on their way to another day on this ship spent with the Courts and "Earl Grey", and it's getting to be late in the morning, and Juno can still feel that little hopeful thought growing.

He's not ready to look at it yet, but there it is, and Peter was there when Juno woke up.

"But really," Mick says, "I'm happy for you, even if your boyfriend is weird and doesn't exist, or whatever."

"Not my boyfriend, we're not children."

Not his boyfriend, that's for normal people with normal lives.

"If you say so," Mick says, and they walk on in silence, until Mick remembers who he is and tries to make Juno make a decision about what to do with the day, and Juno says "I don't care" and that makes Mick sigh loudly, and then they've arrived.

There's croissants and Mick is distracted for a minute, and there's no sign yet of the Courts or of Nureyev, of Peter.

Juno sits and tries to be content, and eats slower than Mick.

"So anyway," Mick says, wiping crumbs off his hands ineffectively, "I don't think I trust your boyfriend-"

"Not my boyfriend."

"I don't think I trust your boyfriend," Mick says, louder, "but if you trust him, I can trust him too."

They have, if Juno is being honest, barely spoken the past, what, fifteen years, and still here Mick is, despite everything, Juno's best friend in ways Juno didn't deserve even when he tried.

Juno grimaces.

Mick points at him.

"And you trust him, right?"

"I," Juno says, and clears his throat, and says the closest thing to an affirmative that he can manage, which is, unfortunately, "I've trusted him with my life."

Juno can see the moment it clicks, for Mick, and he can see Mick's eyes widen comically and his entire face pull down into something resigned and accusatory.

"Couldn't you like a normal person for once in your life!"

And so it goes on, until Peter arrives and smiles at Juno, and Celia and Quentin arrive and turn the conversation to other things, and the day goes as days have been going, and Juno is hopeful.

 

\---

 

The ship nears the next planet sooner than Juno expected - they've reached parts of the galaxy now, apparently, that are more densely populated and easier to navigate and a lot more worth looking at than anything in the solar system.

It's another planet with tall cities, but the edges of them spread out endless and languid into deserts just as bright but much less dangerous than the ones on Mars, so much glittering sand, like the beaches they didn't see on Earth, but no ocean in sight.

Nothing in the universe seems to suit Earl Grey as much as strolling through nearly-quaint streets with the Courts. It's absurd, how Peter blinks and becomes someone just slightly off, and then he looks at Juno over someone's head and is all himself again. Juno wishes they were alone here, maybe, because maybe now he's ready for that, but they're not, and Mick is laughing at him he's pretty sure, and Juno doesn't know what to do with himself.

Mick and Quentin have been confusing themselves hopelessly in an enthusiastic conversation about a card game that neither of them knows anything about, and Juno is silent and listening, and Celia is interrogating Earl Grey about the places he's been and what he thinks about this or knows about that. She tried to involve Juno in that, but gave up on him when he didn't even give one-word answers anymore.

Juno looks at Peter, when he can, when noone is watching, and wishes, and is resigned.

Peter looks back at him, when he can, when Celia is distracted, and Juno hopes that he, too, is wishing, and that's how they pass the time until they're suddenly in a crowd on a square.

It's a little loud and Juno thinks he's already losing sight of Quentin and Mick, and Peter winks at him and points something out to Celia, and Juno looks reflexively, and when he wants to look back to Peter, Peter has disappeared.

Of course he has.

He is utterly impossible and Juno is- he is not ready to think that, but he lets himself feel it.

Juno lets the crowd separate him from the others and winds up, giddy, outside a souvenir shop that even Rita might find too kitschy, and looks at holographic postcards, and waits and hopes.

He doesn't have to wait long.

"Fancy seeing you here," Peter says, on the other side of the rack of postcards, and Juno's heart wants to beat out of his chest for how much he can't believe this is real.

It's not going to be the adventure they were supposed to have, not quite, but they're off Mars, on a planet Juno hasn't seen, alone finally, and Peter Nureyev is looking at him like he never wants to look away.

"Isn't it just," Juno responds, and then he picks out a postcard at random, a horrid sparkling thing, for Rita, because he's not going to thank her in that many words, wouldn't want to explain why he's thanking her anyway, but he can do ugly postcards.

Peter smiles at him, blindingly.

"Ready to go on an adventure?"

"Just let me get this." Juno holds up the postcard, vaguely, and Peter raises an eyebrow.

"That's certainly noticeable, isn't it. Can I...?"

And he stretches out his hand and Juno hands the postcard to him and he should've seen it coming from so many miles away but for a moment he's still thrown off when, from one second to the next, the postcard has disappeared into a pocket.

"You can't just do that," he starts, and Peter smiles at him, all teeth.

"Ready to go?", he repeats.

There's nothing to do for Juno but nod and take Peter's once-more-outstretched hand.

 

\---

 

Not all cities, Juno learns, look the same, especially not when one gets the opportunity to see them on the arm of Peter Nureyev, who navigates bad urban planning like he doesn't even have to think, and approaches tourism still with a thief's eye. It's subtle most of the time, but sometimes it really isn't.

"They do certainly have a unique security system," he says, at one point, "but not in a way I would call an advantage. For them, that is."

Juno coughs so he won't laugh helplessly, and lets Peter pull him along another street.

"You've been to a lot of places," he says, when they're walking down yet another street, because he knew that, obviously he knew, but it's another thing to see Peter so comfortable here, in his element, while Juno flounders and stares and stumbles.

"I have."

There's no reason to make that into anything but a light conversation about all the wonders the galaxy has to offer, but Juno can still, still, still feel a hopeful thought growing, and he can feel his doubts also, starting to encroach on it and pluck it apart.

"And you never stay," he says, with a lump in his throat that he thought he would get to save for later.

"No," Peter says, a little quieter and more serious than before, "I don't."

"Why?"

Juno knows the answer already. He can't ask a heavier question just yet.

"You know why," Peter tells him. Not annoyed, but...

"I, yeah. But-" It's difficult, to even start to have this conversation, because Juno feels like he already knows all the answers, and they're all disparaging, derisive, disinterested, which isn't true, probably, but it feels true. "Do you never want to?"

"I can't," Peter says, final. "I lived somewhere and I thought I would make it a place that could be home, and I was wrong, and the price I decided to pay was that I would never stay for long again, anywhere."

Juno flinches, a little.

"I know," he says, "Sorry, I-"

"No, I'm sorry." Peter stops them, abruptly, and faces Juno, and he looks a lot more gentle than Juno expected, presumed in the part of his brain that was already starting to run away.

They stand there, in a street that is mostly empty and bordered by trees that shouldn't grow in a city and shouldn't grow in a desert, and Juno takes a breath, and another, and tries to stay long enough, at least, that it won't be his fault this time.

"I can't stay," Peter says, "And I know you can't leave Mars, I will not ask you to, but no matter if you would like me to, no matter if I would like to, I can't stay."

He can't stay because it's dangerous, and he can't stay because it's not in his nature, and he shouldn't stay because he doesn't deserve that. Peter Nureyev, bright and sharp-edged, cannot, will not be dulled by the endless red sand and endless gray streets of Mars and Hyperion City.

Juno can't imagine him there even if he dares to attempt to.

"So that's," his voice cracks, and he clears his throat, "that's it, then? We have this holiday, and then I go back to Mars and you go back to what you do?"

They've spent so much time in Juno's room, and that room, the entire ship, these weeks of travel, are a space in which nothing else exists, and the two of them can just be, for once, for now, but they both have tickets on which there is, printed in black ink on white paper, an expiration date for their tentative happiness, and after that, Juno guesses, things will be just as they were, no matter how much he wishes they could be different.

It hurts more than Juno thought it would, because he was starting to hope.

"I don't want that to be it," Peter says.

"I can't leave forever," Juno says, too loud, "I know I left for the stupid cruise, but I can't just- There's things I have to deal with, and-"

"I know."

Juno can't read Peter's face, can't see if he's disappointed or hopeful, if he's annoyed or still patient, and he doesn't know if it's his own shaking hands or if Peter has put on a mask again.

"So what do we do, then?", he says, "What do we do?"

He doesn't mean to say it like an accusation, but by the time it's in his mouth, it feels like one.

And Peter had put on a mask, because the mask slips and he looks impatient and hurt and a little bit pleading, and he doesn't say anything for a moment.

Juno has never wanted to fix anything so badly.

That's a lie.

There have been countless things he has wished he could fix more desperately and hopelessly than this, but this feels within reach, because it's not a death, is it, there's still room to act, if Juno knew how.

And he knows, he thinks, how, but the last time he promised to leave Mars, he couldn't, and this time he has to deal with Ramses too, and he wants to promise anyway, but Peter said that he wasn't asking that of him, so Juno won't pretend that he did.

But something, something has to be said.

"Not like I can go on holiday every time I want to see you," he says, and it's a joke when he opens his mouth but by the time it's out it's... a way forward, even if it's small and silly.

Peter snorts, not meanly.

"No, I suppose not, though it would probably be good for you if you went on holiday more often."

He's not wrong about that, probably, and Juno can think of a lot of people who would agree.

"Dunno, this one's been pretty stressful."

Peter raises an eyebrow.

He doesn't even have to list things Juno's done that were more stressful, Juno knows, but Juno is also still a lot more scared of this, of attempting this, of offering to try, than he has ever been of possible death.

"I can probably do holidays sometimes," he says, and for all that that sounds like just a grudgingly admitted thing, it feels like a step off a cliff, and Juno wants to push it back into his mouth and he wants to say it again and he wants to yell it and his heart is beating so heavily that he can't speak for a second.

Peter looks relieved, and hopeful, and relieved, and that's more of a gift than Juno expected.

"I'm glad," he says, and, "I can go on holidays, too, and I am not opposed to some of them being on Mars."

"Not much to see on Mars."

"Oh, but what there is to see on Mars," Peter says, smiling, "is absolutely worth the trip."

That doesn't make Juno's heart calm down. He can feel his face getting hot, and because he doesn't have an answer to that and Peter is smirking now with the point of a tooth visible and he looks like he's going to say something even more devastating, Juno takes a step closer right there in the street in the open in the sunshine and kisses him.

 

\---

 

Everyone else lost each other in the crowd, so it isn't too suspicious, Juno thinks, when he and Peter only reappear once it's time to board the shuttle back to the Countess Cathleen.

Nonetheless, he smooths out his hair and has to abort a motion to smooth out Peter's hair, and they put a bit more distance between them before they round the last corner and everyone else can see them arrive.

Celia is the first to see them, and she raises her eyebrows but turns back to a conversation she is apparently having with a woman Juno vaguely remembers seeing around the last few weeks, and then Mick spots them and does a much worse thing with his eyebrows, and that's that.

The shuttle isn't ready yet.

They rejoin Mick and Quentin, some of them more grudgingly than others.

"Did you get lost?", Mick says, grinning, when Juno is next to him, and Juno huffs.

"Get lost yourself."

"I'm glad you found each other when you all got separated," says Quentin, oblivious. "Celia was all alone until she ran into some other people from our ship on her way back."

Peter smiles at him.

"I'm glad, too. Being alone in a new place can be terribly boring."

Mick looks like he very desperately wants to say something, and Juno is grateful for Quentin's presence suddenly, for the first time.

"Yes, exactly!", Quentin says, "I'm very happy I didn't get separated from Mr Mercury."

Juno doesn't know what his face looks like, but Mick is barely holding in a laugh, so it must be a sight, which Juno feels is fair because he's still processing that he is going to see Peter again after this, but he can hardly tell Mick that, so Mick will continue being amused.

And now he's stuck again on that conversation they had, on the real possibility of a future shared with Peter Nureyev, and he's going to give them away to absolutely everyone if he looks as giddy and overwhelmed as he feels.

"You had a fun day?", Mick asks Juno, more sincere than Juno expected.

Juno doesn't know how to even begin answering that. No of course not he started a stressful conversation he didn't mean to have because he thought he already knew the answers. Yes of course he was with Peter.

The door to the shuttle hisses open and Juno flees as dignifiedly as he can.

He sits in the first window seat he finds and stares out of the window and glances out of the corner of his eye at Peter when he sits down next to him, to make sure it's really him.

(Of course it's him.)

Everyone else takes a while to filter in and find seats and put their purchases somewhere, and Juno keeps looking out of the window, because it hits him, just when he's about to look away, that he isn't going to see this place again, which is... this day feels monumental, if he allows himself to think that, and it's strange that he will leave the place it happened in and never return.

The doors close, and Juno sighs.

"Something on your mind?", Peter asks.

Juno turns towards him.

"You," he says, before he can change his mind.

They're going to leave this planet soon and Juno will never see it again, but he is going to see Peter again, and he may yet see other planets and have other monumental days with Peter at his side.

Peter looks delighted.

"What a coincidence," he starts, and is interrupted by a very pointed little cough.

Celia Court has sat down in the seat across from Peter, and she crosses her legs, now, and looks at Peter very steadily, and Juno has a bad feeling about this. It's never particularly fun when he's right about his worries, and he wasn't expecting this right now, he was distracted, he had forgotten because he is an idiot, he-

"You know," Celia says, casually, to Peter, "I was incredibly suspicious of you and your entire behavior, but I'm glad the explanation is so simple."

"Pardon?", says Peter.

Juno holds onto the edge of his seat and tries not to panic just yet.

Peter Nureyev is good, he is, but Juno could've told him from the beginning, did in fact try to tell him, that Ms Celia Court is smarter than most of his targets, and entirely uninclined to being distracted by the force of his personality.

"Oh," Celia says, laughs, "you were sneaking around and making strange excuses and you seemed... uninvested in a lot of your conversations with my brother, which I thought was strange, after you seemed to have... hit it off, so to speak."

Nureyev sits up a bit straighter, not anxious but paying attention, now.

"My apologies, I-"

"No, no," Celia interrupts him, and then she laughs again, and then she looks meaningfully at Juno, who hates this and is starting to be confused. "I understand you were... distracted by your prior acquaintance with the detective."

"What," Juno says. His panic comes to a screeching halt.

She smirks at him.

"You are not a subtle lady, detective. Mr Grey might have managed to hide it otherwise, just barely, but you are quite openly besotted, I'm sorry to inform you."

"What," Juno repeats, weakly, mostly to avoid having to process that and turn his confusion into embarrassment.

"Really, Juno," Peter says, back in his element if his tone is any indication, and he turns to look at Juno with a grin, "we shouldn't be surprised that we've been found out, we're neither of us particularly subtle with our feelings."

Juno definitely hates this conversation.

"You're really not," Celia says, "which is why I don't understand you sneaking around like star-crossed lovers."

"Well." Juno doesn't know how to finish that sentence.

Peter laughs and reaches for his hand, like he doesn't need time to get used to the thought of being able to do that, like this couldn't still turn out to be dangerous.

"Old habits die hard," he says, with a shrug.

Why he would take that kind of risk, Juno can't fathom, but Peter does have a better track record with opening his mouth and not getting shot at than Juno does, presumably, and Juno is going to have to assume that he knows what he's doing.

"I would ask," Celia says, "but I doubt you'd tell me."

"I'm very sorry," Peter tells her. He sounds sincere if someone expects to hear sincerity, which Celia's raised eyebrow says she didn't, but she also doesn't seem to care too much.

Juno leans into Peter, just to see if he really can.

The shuttle lifts off, away from another planet, and Juno considers watching it go, but Peter pulls him even closer, and Juno lets him and gets lost in it for just a moment, until he remembers that there's still people around them and tries to at least sit up a bit straighter.

He looks at Celia out of the corner of his eye, because he isn't done being anxious just yet.

Celia uncrosses her legs and leans back into her seat and looks out of the window. She's done with them, apparently.

Juno breathes out, slowly, and leans back, too.

 

\---

 

"Are you done worrying about Celia, then?", Peter asks Juno, later.

"No," Juno says, just to be contrary.

Peter sighs and fishes the remote off the bedside table on his side of the bed, and then he turns on the news of all things.

That's what Juno gets for being bad company, he guesses.

They watch the news, or at least Peter does, and then he produces a bottle of nailpolish from god knows where and starts painting his nails and only listens to the news, and Juno listens and doesn't comprehend anything because he's watching the blues of the screen flicker across Peter's face, down-turned, nose wrinkled in concentration.

It's a small miracle, or maybe a big miracle, that it doesn't feel like wasted time to be watching the news while they're here together, because they'll see each other again, they will, and the cruise isn't even over yet, they have time for silence and for companionable boredom.

And they have endless time on this cruise now, if they're not hiding, Juno realizes slowly; they have time and there's a good chance that Celia really doesn't suspect that there's more to Earl Grey's behavior than, well, Juno.

Juno himself, he also realizes, still doesn't know what Peter wants from the Courts.

He can admit to himself, now, that most of his anger about not knowing Peter's plan was just a distraction from other feelings, but he's still bothered by it just a little, because he prides himself on being good at his job, including the part where he puts all the clues together, and he's seen Peter steal at least half a dozen small things and still he can't for the life of him think of a common thread.

"Stop frowning, your face will get stuck like that," Peter tells him, "and that would be a pity now, wouldn't it?"

He's not even looking up from his nails as he says it.

Juno frowns more anyway.

"I still don't know what the job is that you're here for, and that kind of bothers me? Just a little."

"Does it." Amused.

"It does." Juno has started now, and he keeps going. "You got Celia's keycard, right, and most of your attention has been on Quentin, and I'm pretty sure half of the things he's had in his pockets have migrated to your pockets, but you also got that ring from that woman you never spoke to again, and as far as I can see she's got nothing to do with the Courts, and I might be missing something but when I tried to have Rita look them up-"

Peter is grinning at him. Juno stops.

"You had Rita look them up? My, you're invested in this. I thought you were on holiday."

Juno glares at him, briefly.

"Well, I don't know if she found anything, because the signal cut out halfway through the call." It seems ages ago, now, but it can't possibly be that long. Long enough, though- "Don't think she ever tried to call me back about it..."

The news are still running, but Peter turns towards Juno and puts on a long-sufferingly helpful face.

"You've been very busy, it is very possible you missed her call. But I would've expected her to leave a voicemail in that case."

Juno must be looking at him blankly, because Peter blinks, shakes his head, then sighs and mutes the news and holds out a hand.

"Give me your comms?"

He isn't sure where his comms is. He didn't need it, he put it down somewhere and he can't for the life of him remember where.

"Uh."

"On your bedside table," Peter says, amused, and then he raises an eyebrow and says, "...detective."

He's insufferable. Juno is so in love with him it hurts.

The comms is a good excuse to turn away, momentarily, and compose himself, and then he hands the comms to Peter and watches him tap away on it for just a few seconds before he sets it on the bed between them and Rita's voice screeches out of it.

"Hi boss! You're not picking up, which I hope means you're having so much fun, but I looked up the people you told me to look up, because I want you to keep having fun, and I hope you don't need this info because you've picked up a case somehow, I know you Mister Steel and you're terrible at taking a break, but anyway, I did a search and I only looked at pictures a little I promise, and I shouldn't be telling you this because you're on holiday and you can't go solving cases, but I was researching them again this morning because I was bored and there's this whole thing, I swear it's just like in the second season of Io Society, you know-"

Juno does not know.

Rita goes on regardless, until she is cut off by a beep, and then Peter does something and she starts again.

"Whoops," she says, and maybe Juno misses her a little. "Voicemail can only be so long, got it. Anyway, what I was saying was, they're not actually twins and it's a whole conspiracy and you can't go solving cases but it's so exciting and I'm definitely going to find out more about it and it's going to be so much fun, which I get to have because you're also having fun, and if you're not, well, that's just like you Mister Steel but I don't approve of it. Go have some fun. Bye!"

And that's that.

"Well," Peter says into the silence, "that's certainly one way of putting it."

Juno is processing.

"You knew."

"That they're not twins? Yes."

"And your job is..."

Peter pushes the comms back towards him.

"To prove that they aren't, which is more difficult than you'd expect, but I didn't get my many reputations for nothing."

"Right," Juno says, "right. That's going to be trouble for them."

If someone had told him at the beginning of this cruise that he'd end up caring about the general well-being of Quentin Court, he wouldn't even have bothered laughing at them, but he finds himself uncomfortable with this, suddenly, more than he expected, even though it is certainly less bad than most other things he knows Peter has done.

"It's a job, Juno." Peter smiles indulgently. "And Celia Court can take care of both herself and her... brother."

"I know," Juno says, unhappily.

Peter leans over and presses a kiss to the corner of Juno's mouth. Not like he wants to distract him, only like a reminder.

"I can't tell you all the details, I don't know all the details, but I doubt they'll get hurt, and it's just a job."

Juno rubs a hand over his face.

"Yeah, sure, but you do a lot of things for jobs."

"You know I can draw a line if I need to," Peter says, like a joke, but looking serious enough that Juno feels, paradoxically, reassured.

"Just don't. Don't fuck over someone who my best friend is pretty likely going to try to send christmas cards to?"

He doesn't know how else to phrase it, and that's not quite it, but it's better than nothing; he's trying.

"I'll see what I can do."

They're both trying, Juno guesses.

"Thanks," he says, roughly, and then he clears his throat, and then he grabs for the remote and switches off the news finally, and Peter catches his hand and pulls him in for a kiss.

 

\---

 

They're not good at having conversations they need to, but they're getting good at trying, and maybe in time they'll get good at saying what they mean, because practice makes perfect, or something.

Juno hates feeling optimistic. It makes him nervous.

Quentin Court congratulates them, because his sister who isn't his sister told him to pay more attention, and Juno and Peter have given up on being subtle. Mostly Peter has given up on being subtle, and Juno doesn't know how to respond to that, let alone how to respond to earnest congratulations, and Mick still isn't helping.

Mick does seem to be warming up to Peter, though. They have conversations that are genuinely pleasant, and Peter laughs at Mick's jokes, and a few days into this being apparently the new normal, Mick flops down on a couch next to Juno while everyone else is off doing other things and grins at him like he's very proud of himself and also Juno.

"I'm really glad we went on this cruise," he proclaims, "And you got your boyfriend back!"

Juno groans.

"Still not my boyfriend, it makes me feel ridiculous."

"What else am I supposed to call him?"

"Could try his name."

"I can't keep track of his names situation," Mick says, waving a hand dismissively, and, "I wonder if Rita knew he'd be here. Has she met him?"

It takes a moment to register, and then another moment to piece itself together, and then Juno has to review a number of conversations he had right before this holiday was forced upon him.

"Hang on, you knew? Rita planned this and you knew? I knew she made it happen, obviously, but you knew-"

"Yeah? Of course I did?"

He doesn't just look like he thinks Juno's reaction is funny, he looks proud of himself, too, the traitor.

"Ugh," Juno says.

"You can't win this kind of cruise doing crosswords, come on, J. Also I'm not super good at crosswords."

Juno throws his hands in the air.

"What do I know about cruises! Or crosswords!"

Mick shrugs.

"You've learned some more about them now I guess."

"Right." Juno sinks back into the couch. "Right, okay, fine."

It's not like he can change having gone on this cruise now, it's way too late for that, and he doesn't think he would if he could, knowing where it has led him. As terrible as the beginning was, as much as he hates holidays on principle, as unsure as he still feels about what he and Peter are attempting to do and attempting to be, Juno thinks he can recognize happiness when he feels it, even if it's just a little happiness and very nervous.

He feels unbearably sappy, and a little stupid.

"So," Mick says, "did Rita meet your boyfriend when he was your boyfriend the first time?"

"That's classified," Juno says, and regrets it for about two seconds, until Mick makes an outraged, surprised noise that turns quickly into laughter, and then Juno grins at him.

"You're not allowed to say that," Mick says, grinning back, "Sasha gets to say that."

"Sasha doesn't have a monopoly on knowing things you shouldn't ask questions about."

"I mean, I guess. But it's still a Sasha thing."

Juno shrugs, unrepentant, and Mick wrinkles his nose.

"Speaking of Sasha," he says, "I should probably call her again, to tell her we're not dead yet."

"You do that."

 

\---

 

Mick does actually call Sasha that evening, in Juno's room because he claims the connection is better there, occupying half of the couch and an entire armchair, with no concern for Juno's grumbling.

"Get your shoes off the furniture, Mercury," Juno says, as a last resort, and Mick leaves his feet where they are as he starts a call, puts it on speaker, and sets his comms on the coffee table.

"Hello Mick." Long-suffering, crackly from the distance. As warm as Sasha ever gets.

Juno sinks down into his armchair properly.

He misses her, a little, sometimes, and maybe there could be something to be done about that, but he has Peter back in his life now, who can't run into Sasha, because Sasha can't ever catch him on Mars, after Rex Glass; Juno has made a mess of his life, and he's managing, maybe, but he wouldn't be able to manage that particular disaster waiting to happen.

"We haven't died yet!", Mick says, cheerfully.

"It's frankly a miracle."

"Hey, even Juno is less grumpy than that now!"

Sasha sighs, maybe fond, maybe annoyed, one can never be sure, but she doesn't hang up.

"I'm glad you're alive. And having fun, I presume."

"So much fun," Mick tells her, as fervent as he can be, which is very, and then he makes a complicatedly ridiculous eyebrow-moving face at Juno and adds, "Some of us more than others!"

"No," Juno says, at the same time as Sasha says, "I don't even want to know," and Mick ignores them both.

"Juno never tells me anything, but there was this guy on this cruise, right-"

"No," Juno says, again, and there's a knock at the door because Peter promised he'd see him in just a little while, and Juno says "no, don't," again, but the door opens anyway.

Sasha is sighing, Mick is momentarily distracted from blabbing but will certainly continue any second now.

"Good afternoon," Peter Nureyev says, standing in the doorway, leaned against it very prettily, and then he takes in Juno's panicked face, presumably, and frowns. "Am I interrupting?"

"Goddamnit," Juno says, and he's already getting up, stumbling. "We're leaving, come on."

"We are?"

The door isn't far enough away from the coffee table, Sasha can definitely hear Peter, and Juno doesn't know if she ever heard Rex Glass and he doesn't know if she would recognize a voice from far away through a comms connection, but he isn't taking any chances.

"What's going on? Mick?"

"Sorry," Mick says. Juno takes the few steps towards Peter and tries to push him out of the room, and he moves, reluctantly. "J's boyfriend is here, and he's feeling awkward about it."

"I'm sorry, his what," Sasha says, and that's when Juno closes the door behind himself and Peter.

He's leaving both of their fate in Mick's hands, but Mick doesn't know too much; they'll be fine, it'll be fine, they've gotten out of so much worse situations.

Juno leans against the closed door. His legs feel a little wobbly, even though he isn't all that panicked.

Peter gives him a minute.

"Who was that?" It's a very careful question, but he doesn't seem concerned, so he must not have recognized the voice, which calms Juno down more than anything else could have. Maybe Sasha never heard Rex Glass' voice, maybe Mick will only mention an Earl Grey, and nothing will happen, except that Juno will have to continue feeling silly and utterly transparently sappy when someone calls Peter his boyfriend.

"Agent Sasha Wire, from Dark Matters." He can see Peter freeze just a little, and smiles weakly. "Childhood best friend."

Peter shakes his head, disbelieving.

"You never cease to surprise me."

"Yeah no I," Juno says, "I'm aware this isn't great for you, but I don't actually ever talk to her anymore. So."

"Juno," Peter says, and then he stops and frowns.

Juno holds his hands out for Peter to take, because it may be easier to have these conversations if he has a physical reminder that Peter isn't leaving yet, he thinks, and Peter takes his hands and pulls him closer and moves a thumb gently over the back of Juno's hand while he looks down and thinks.

"I'm not giving up on us this easily," he says, "but I didn't believe you when you talked about danger, and maybe I should have."

"Yep. Got Sasha, and I'm gonna have to deal with a whole situation involving the mayor of Hyperion City as soon as I'm back, and I don't actually know what my secretary will do if she sees you again."

"Even in one city on one planet," Peter starts, and smiles more than smirks, "you get into more trouble than one detective rightfully should, but I don't think your secretary of all people will be much of a problem."

"She's a lot."

"Oh, yes, I will concede that much."

They're silent for a moment.

Juno isn't as worried as he thinks he may have been even a week ago. He doesn't think Peter will leave because of this, because he would say if he were going to, and he would try to negotiate, and maybe he would ask Juno to come with him again.

Juno Steel is feeling optimistic, still, and he still hates it, but he's so grateful for it, too.

"We'll figure it out," he tells Peter, and believes it, mostly, and Peter smiles at him so widely that Juno has to smile back.

"We will. We've figured out worse things than this."

 

\---

 

Even if they had lifetimes, they wouldn't be able to see everything the galaxy has to offer, but they make a start on this cruise, and they talk, and Juno tries to explain Ramses and it doesn't go as badly as he feared, and they tiptoe around the subject of family but it's alright, and Celia makes fun of them every chance she gets, and Mick tells Juno very earnestly once more that he is happy for him, and Juno is happy, for once, as much as he can.

And it ends, of course it does.

But even if Juno will be on Mars again and dealing with Ramses and less happy maybe, because holidays are an exception, he knows, Peter promised he would be returning to Mars in a little while, and wrote the date on a piece of paper for Juno, who put it in his coat pocket.

The cruise ends, and it's maybe a beginning more than an end, Juno thinks, right before he falls asleep, when he's allowed to think things like that.

 

\---

 

Mick took ages to find all of his things and put them in his suitcase that was suddenly too small, and Juno had to walk embarrassedly to Peter's room multiple times, returning nailpolish bottles and pens and a lost sock, but their suitcases are packed and they're ready to descend towards Mars in a shuttle they've been in so many times at this point, and Juno is holding Peter's hand with a little more fear than none, but little enough that he is surprised at himself.

Mars looks strange from above, still.

Juno doesn't get carsick this time, just nervous, and it sticks around like carsickness does, still there when they're walking down a light gray tunnel thing into a hallway into the spaceport proper.

He knows Peter isn't leaving forever. He knows. But it's still another thing that could make or break them, so he is nervous, and he squeezes Peter's hand as they walk and Peter pulls him closer and lets go of his hand to wrap that arm around Juno's waist.

It wasn't a dream, Juno thinks, a little hysterically, because he's only now realizing that it should've felt like one.

He isn't sure he's ready for what comes next, but he knows he's going to try to be.

 

They're behind Celia and Quentin and Mick, which means Mick can't see them and make fun of Juno, but it also means that when they emerge into the big hall of the spaceport, it takes Juno a second to notice the sign.

A fraction of a second. It's a very noticeable sign.

MR DETECTIVE JUNO STEEL it says, and smaller underneath, AND MICK

Rita is holding it, presumably; it's a very large sign, aside from being bright, but Juno can see Rita's hair and her glasses.

She spots Juno just a moment later, and tries to push her way towards him, dragging her sign behind her.

"Mr Steel!"

Peter laughs, quietly, next to Juno.

"I enjoyed these weeks with you very much," he says, and then Rita has arrived, with tunnel vision, leaving confused travelers and their relatives in her wake.

"Mr Steel! There was a stream on that I wanted to watch, but I thought, Rita, you have to get Mr Steel from the spaceport, he can't just go arriving to noone, and you can watch that stream later, and-"

Juno missed her, he realizes, as he's starting to smile.

"You really didn't have to, Rita."

Rita scoffs, and then she's folding her sign and shoving it into her bag, but when she's done she looks up at Juno, and looks up, and widens her eyes so comically that Juno would fear they might pop out if he weren't very familiar with the faces she makes. "Agent- Mr Rex Glass!", she squeaks, and looks at Juno and back at Peter. "What are you doing here?"

Peter laughs, again.

"I was on holiday, Miss Rita."

"Oh!", Rita says, "Well, yes, but why are you with Mr Steel, why are you just, Mr Steel! Why is he not arrested!"

"Doesn't usually stick, with him," Juno says, and when she squints at him suspiciously he does his best to look apologetic. "I'll explain later?"

Rita doesn't look convinced, but Mick has fought his way through to the luggage conveyor belts and back with their suitcases.

"Hi Miss Rita!", he says, "Have you met J's boyfriend?"

"What!", Rita says. "What! Mr Steel!"

She's doing the face thing again, and she's getting so loud that people are staring.

"We reconnected," Peter says, smoothly, and before Rita can find an answer to that, he goes on with, "And I have to leave soon, so if you could give us just a moment to say goodbye?"

She opens her mouth and closes it again and gasps, confused, and Peter says "it's always a pleasure to meet you, Miss Rita," and pulls Juno away by the elbow, towards a corner of the room that is if not empty at least empty of people who know them.

"Juno," he says.

"Yeah. I." Juno has to swallow. He feels like a fool, and he feels like a person in a spaceport in a movie, saying tearful goodbyes to a lover, and he feels like a fool. "I've enjoyed the past few weeks, too."

"You know when I'll be back." He does, but it's nice to hear Peter mention it again. "I think I can be on Mars for a while, and then we can plan further ahead."

"Yeah," Juno says, and he has to clear his throat again, and he reaches for Peter's hands, and Peter takes them.

This is more difficult than Juno thought, and less terrible than he thought, too.

"I would like to see Earth again with you, I think," Peter says, quietly, looking at Juno very steadily, "because we didn't quite, on this trip, and it's not too far from here."

"Yes. I'd... I think I'd like that too."

It's easy to say yes, now - Juno wonders if it would be easier to say other things too. He doesn't know if he's ready to say them, regardless, but maybe he could.

"Mr Steel!", Rita calls, across the hall, "Hurry up, I'm gonna miss another stream!"

"I'm in love with you too," Juno blurts out, months and lifetimes after what he's half-responding to.

It has been true for a while, but there it is now, a little incongruously, and Juno wants to make it go back into his mouth so he can lock it up and keep it secret, until his racing mind registers the way Peter is looking at him, and then he wants to say it again.

He can't, of course. Saying it once doesn't make it that much less impossible to say. But they'll see each other again.

"I'm glad," Peter says, with unnameable emotion, and, "I'm in love with you too."

"Mr Steel!", Rita yells. "I'm leaving now!"

"Literally just one minute!", Juno yells back, and then he turns back to Peter and takes a step closer and leans up and kisses him, and doesn't waste that minute.

There's no more yells, and maybe Rita leaves, but Juno can take a cab if he needs to.

It's not their last goodbye kiss, Juno knows, and when they pull apart, Peter smiles at him like he knows, too.

"I'll see you soon," he says.

Juno nods, and takes a step back, and when he lets his hands slip from Peter's, he puts one hand into the coat pocket with the note.

"Yeah. See you soon."


End file.
